Mindset, skillset, and toolset

Some notes about getting the order right

I read something on LinkedIn that lighted a light bulb in my head.

Mindset, skillset, and toolset are the 3 things you need to get right in your career, in that exact order.

It was something I started to learn but couldn't articulate that well, so I wanted to note it down.

Order matters

A lot of times I have struggled in my career. It often felt like no matter how much I liked my job and tried to perfect my work/skills, I was always swimming upstream and something of key importance was missing. I thought it was people skills, political savvyness, or even because I was not as good as I thought. Only now do I realize it was because I got the wrong order, the wrong priority.

When I wanted to learn new technologies and read new books, I was focusing on my skills. When I got to the discussion about the latest features of a framework or language, my mind was placed on the tools. They are for sure important to make a good engineer and to keep myself interested, but the breakthroughs rarely happen.

When I decided to stop thinking about tasks as homework I need to solve by myself, I got work done faster, received better feedback, and most importantly, I gained the confidence that I can handle my job. A breakthrough happened because I changed how I think about work.

I think I agree with this order. Changing my mindset by far has made the most impact in how confident I am, and how others are of me. That means I'm doing it right.

It's about direction

In the LinkedIn post that I learned this idea from, some juniors creatives created low quality work using AI and was called out for it. If their skills weren't sharp, it's naturally impossible to create good result with AI, because they just don't know what makes a piece of work good.

Similarly, it could be the case that I have been really swimming upstream. I was spending time improving the skills I thought was important but didn't turn out to be practically helpful. The direction of all that learning was not right.

Instead, if I first spend some time figuring out what I should do to get what I want out of my career, then the skills I need to sharpen and the tools I want to master should automatically follow. They will be more valuable and worthwhile, because I'm carefully deciding what should help my career the most and thinking from that perspective (my current definition of "mindset").

Examples of helpful mindset I learned so far: