Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, wrote an interesting piece called "What are You Destined to Be?" on his popular Blog Maverick blog.

"Going to college should be about experiencing as much academically as you possibly can, but more importantly, it should be about learning how to learn....Once you have learned how to learn, then you can try as many different things as you can...."

Upon reading that, I realized, "Hey--I'm good at learning." Which is something I hadn't really considered before.

In my work, I continually confront new learning curves, usually computer-related. (Lots of people do, so I'm not claiming any great uniqueness.)

I remember back around 1983, I returned from Christmas vacation in California to find an AT&T MS-DOS computer (2 floppy drives, no hard disk!), an Okidata dot-matrix printer, and several unopened software packages sitting on my desk. I'd never used a computer before. But I dug in, and a month later was producing the denominational magazine on that computer (actually, just putting the text on a floppy, which a printing company turned into long strips of typeset copy, which I laid out over a light table). Remember--this was MS-DOS, for goodness sakes! The entire user interface consisted of Courier text on a green monitor!

In 1988, when I got a Mac and a laser printer, I gave myself three weeks to learn Pagemaker and crank out the next issue of the magazine (this time, with little need for the light table).

The truth is, I enjoy conquering learning curves. And I enjoy the crash-course route. That love-of-the-last-minute may not be a good trait, but it's most definitely an aptitude.