Advice I like from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (Matthew Frederick):

Being Process Oriented, not Product Driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.

Being process oriented means:

• seeking to understand a design problem before chasing after decisions
• not force fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems
• removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas
• making design investigations and decisions holistically (that address several aspects of a design problem at once) rather than sequentially (that finalize one aspect of a solution before investigating the next);
• making design decisions conditionally – that is, with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue toward a final solution;
• knowing when to change and when to stick with previous decisions
• accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do;
• working fluidly between concept-scale and detail-scale to see how each informs the other;
• Always asking “What if…?” regardless of how satisfied you are with your solution.

Not a far stretch to make to software engineering. I especially love the “be slow to fall in love with your ideas” line. It’s easy to be seduced by how sexy something is and be blind to the fact that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Admit it, you’ve done it too. Above all, be flexible, consider more than just what you see right now and remember that software is constantly evolving – you should too.

Even if you have no intentions of learning anything more about architecture, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School is a nice read with lots of good parallels, I highly suggest it.