My stubbornness knows no bounds, and when I get latched on to a problem, I will work on it until a workaround is figured out or the problem is solved. Some say thats a good thing, but others, including myself, see it as a curse of sorts. I often give up actually thinking about how to better solve a problem, and just resort to brute force. Oh yes, I'm a terribly lazy man, and as I always say, "Laziness is the father of innovation". However, I can sometimes be lazy about my laziness, and end up back in brute force land.
All that being said, sometimes tenacity can be a good thing. I once spent over 8 hours unknotting a skein of yarn for my wife. About 3 or 4 hours in, she told me to stop, that it was just one skein, and it wasn't worth it. I wasn't having any of it though. It was going to get untangled, dammit, I was not going to let it beat me. Think about that. I spent 1/3 of a day untieing knots. How bloody rediculous.
I'm sure that ties in with my work ethic, I'll beat my brain against a problem until its bloody and raw, and I have a hard time backing away. I've mentioned this in job interviews, as both a strength and a weakness, and interviewers, if they've got a lick of sense, see this honesty, and appreciate it. At least I damn well hope they appreciate it, because underlying the stubbornness is a willingness to get the job done.
I think I've always been this stubborn, and the idea of anything being possible, given enough time, has been around for a while. In "The Phantom Tollbooth", Milo and Tock are given the task of moving a pile of sand one grain at a time with tweezers. I believe this was done to illustrate the concept of infinity, but at the time, I remember myself saying "Well yes, that would take a lot of time, but certainly not an infinite amount of time."
The geeky part of me will probably now go into a mathematecal equation to figure out exactly how much time it would take them to move a 10 ft high conical pile of sand.
But I'll let you have that fun yourself.
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