Just my 2cents, alot of people mentioned alot criteria which I heard during my days as (empathy : backend engineer, abstract thinking : android dev, communication: company tech lead). But I think the core is the mindset to self improve that's best for you right NOW (self discipline).
This is really really really hard to do, since we are mostly lazy beings who rather click 50 arrow up key to find the one important command than remembering it or just dont mind to repeat a mundane process without finding a shortcut to do it faster. Programmers who I met that manage to finish a task in 10 minutes instead of 1 day usually have this trait. But I guess this applies to other jobs as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Btw, I used to work as a part timer at my university department. One day one of the staff ask me to reformat about 90 Excels document to her desire format, she spend 10 minutes showing me how to type them out one by one. After this, I went to setup Python environment in that computer and google how to read excel docs. In a few hours I have finish the work that what would took me more than half a day to finish.
This is really really really hard to do, since we are mostly lazy beings who rather click 50 arrow up key to find the one important command than remembering it or just dont mind to repeat a mundane process without finding a shortcut to do it faster. Programmers who I met that manage to finish a task in 10 minutes instead of 1 day usually have this trait. But I guess this applies to other jobs as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Btw, I used to work as a part timer at my university department. One day one of the staff ask me to reformat about 90 Excels document to her desire format, she spend 10 minutes showing me how to type them out one by one. After this, I went to setup Python environment in that computer and google how to read excel docs. In a few hours I have finish the work that what would took me more than half a day to finish.