The beginning

The beginning [NOTE: this post is so named because it was the start of a personal journal originally posted on another blog site.] At work they recently gave us access to a test that is designed to find your strengths. The point of view of the people who came up with it is that too many studies talk about improving your faults or negative qualities rather than focusing on the positive. My results were not too particularly shocking for me. 1. Input Much like Johnny Five, I thirst for knowledge. I spent a good ten minutes yesterday discussing with a coworker how clouds form. She is a former pilot and therefore learned a lot about weather conditions, and so I was quizzing her based on the little I could remember from school. Once a stray thought got me thinking about twins which led me to Wikipedia to read about them and I learned just how inexact a method human reproduction is. It’s so easy for so many things to go wrong that it’s kind of amazing. I get what Doc Manhattan was saying to Laurie. That’s just two examples off the top of my head, but basically I’m always storing information like this in my brain because I love to learn. 2. Deliberative It basically means I am cautious and will review all the risks of something before I dive in. Sometimes it means I play devil’s advocate just because, other times it just means that I’m not going to move forward on something until I’ve researched every angle. It is exceedingly rare that you will see me make an impulsive decision. It also means I don’t share very much of myself with other people beyond a few close friends. 3. Intellection They should really just call this one introversion, because that’s essentially what it is. Needing alone time to think things through and being better at expressing my thoughts in written form. It also means I have an aversion to small talk, and would much rather focus on things that matter. 4. Consistency Both an aversion to favoritism and a desire for things to remain constant. It applies to both my nature to treat everyone fairly and put myself in the other person’s shoes, as well as the fact that I’m a creature of habit and generally follow a similar routine every day to create more and more efficiency at those processes. 5. Restorative I’m a problem solver. When I first got into this job there were a lot of imbalances in some of the accounts related to what I do, and digging in deep and through the years to see what went wrong and how was a lot of fun. The fact that those problems are pretty much all resolved now is actually a little disappointing to me. This also means that I look for things wrong in myself, always trying to fix them. The problem with that comes in when I find things too deep to be fixed easily, and become disappointed in myself when I can’t fix them right away. One of their suggested action items for #3 was to write a journal. I’m combining that with a way to improve #5, because I had a livejournal in the past and I mostly used it to complain about things. I don’t want to do that. Instead, this will be a chronicle of awesome, interesting, or positive things that happen to me or maybe just some new bit of knowledge I found or a deep philosophical matter I’ve been pondering. If you want to hang around and read or comment, you’re more than welcome to. All I ask is that if things do go near political, religious, or other sensitive matters that you treat everyone respectfully. My consistency will probably not tolerate it otherwise. I’m not going to promise that I will write here everyday because that’s usually a guaranteed recipe for failure, but I will try to write often.