My five negative traits

Don't Put Extra Effort Into Your Work

It makes you feel underpaid. Really. What you do is you OPTIMIZE your work. Plan, organize, automate if necessary to get the repetitive tasks with common logic out of the way.
With optimized work, you get to have more free time, come home early, enjoy your work, and people love your output. The art of effortless effort.

Stop Thinking Out of the Box

The Box is your friend. Know the Box, love the Box, master the Box. What you should do is think BEYOND the Box. But stay in the Box.
The Box makes your clients happy. Give your clients what they want, and afterwards, give them more. Expand the box. No one is happy when they receive something different from what they wanted. Everyone is happy to receive something in addition to what they want.

Don't Love Your Work

You get too attached to it that it gives you a comfort zone. Comfortable enough to lose your edge. LOVE A JOB WELL DONE. Any job given to you. If you are the janitor, make it the shiniest floor in all the world.
Every bit of success will give you hunger to strive for more. Achieve a good number of successes and you will be able to face any challenge presented to you. Don't run from the unknown. Close your eyes, reach out your hand, and take it.

Don't Strive To Be The Best

It gives a bad name to 'competition'. Strive to be DIFFERENT. Find a niche. Exploit it. And after mastering that area where you contribute something where others cannot, find another.
Opportunities abound. Know yourself, know your strengths and weaknesses. Only then will you recognize the needs waiting to be filled.

Don't Feel Ownership For Your Work

Instead, BE YOUR WORK. Put your soul into it. Let your work breathe life. Every little keystroke forming a masterpiece. Your logic. You.
People will love it just because it feels so alive. Well thought out, planned, and just looking at it is like looking at you. If it is a test case, it should feel like you are telling the reader what to do. If it is a piece of running code, or automation tool, it will be like you working on the keyboard doing the job for your clients.

Boni’s Negatives: (DPM senior software developer), rewritten July 29, 2011