Seven habits of increasingly technical technical writers

As someone with a completely non-technical background (an English degree), and who now works in software as a technical writer, I get a lot of questions about how I made that leap. They often jump directly to the practical: how did you become a technical writer in software, if you went in only knowing how to analyze Shakespeare? Are there any courses you took that made you Officially Technical? Is there a book I can read that will transform me into a Technical Person? You get to a point where your commit history stops being embarrassing...right?
It can feel like a letdown or a cop-out when I tell them the answer to all of those questions is no (the last one resoundingly so).
Picking up new skills can sometimes feel intimidating - and it’s easy to go to work every day without examining your assumptions, thought patterns or habits, so that process might not improve. But when I started thinking about the successful technical writers in my life, I noticed they share a pattern of attitudes and behaviours that make picking up technical skills an easier, and even deeply satisfying, part of the job.
Adapting similar attitudes can keep your learning process moving, and building up those technical skills will happen naturally as part of getting your writing tasks done. In doing so, you'll find that the real secret to being "technical" isn't any specific skill you have - it's a habit.
So I've come up with seven suggestions for building habits that are still practical, but that feed the underlying drive and ability to pick up technical skills:

1. Don't essentialize your lack of experience (i.e., don't tell yourself, "I'm not a technical person" - tell yourself, "I haven't learned this technical skill yet")
2. Redirect overwhelm into curiosity
3. Turn your knowledge gaps into specific questions
4. Get tinkering
5. Notice how many people you admire are in the same boat
6. Don't let "perfect" become the enemy of "good enough"
7. Learn to love the process - and know if you can't