A Cry in the Jungle--exercise 3 references exercise 2.

Conan the Librarian was exploring the deep jungles when he heard a cry for help. After much in-depth jungle searching, he discovered that a temporal vortex carrying back his own voice crying out, crying out for the soul-searching that he would do during his jungle-searching quest. Especially which learning habits are easiest and hardest for him, because that's the kind of thing you think about when you're searching through the jungle...

Of the learning habits:

Laughing and positivity are my strengths.

Laughter is so often born out of the ability to take our assumptions and turn them on their collective head, viewing things through an unexpected frame. And I love re-examining assumptions. I am often drawn to books that provide new and different ideas whether it be non-fiction reexaminations about the way we think or calculate a la "Blink" and "Freakonomics" or fictional reconsiderations of reality.

I have often devoted excessive thought and purple prose to intellectual justification of my sense of positivity--progress reflected in the abolition of slavery, the move away from the class society of the middle ages, etc. But if I'm really honest with myself it probably has more to do with having had a great childhood with wonderful parents.

Now this is a puzzler--my greatest weakness among these learning habits is an inability to give myself credit. I have trouble rectifying that with my general sense of positivity about the world, with my mother's absolute determination that her children would know how valued they were--a lesson that my sister really mastered. I guess it may be the flip side of the coin of questioning. I'm not satisfied taking things at face value--it's not enough that an authority figure said something or that something is buttressed by years of institutionalized inertia, I need to ask why. I need to see that what we do isn't just a reaction to conditions which no longer exist or assumptions which we have since found to be false. And I refuse to believe that just because I came up with an idea, it must be right. That I consider a strength. But there's a degree to which second-guessing yourself becomes counterproductive. So call it overintellectualization. Call it a lack of courage. Call it whatever--but I do have the unfortunate habit of selling myself short.