In elementary school, I used to do other children's schoolwork for money and candy. Doing so I learned that the more difficult something was to understand, the more people are willing to pay you to do it for them.The beauty of knowledge is that once a person puts in the effort to learn something, the act of using that knowledge becomes trivial but no less valuable. In business terms, learning has a high investment cost, but zero overhead and usually a high return.I like to believe that my greatest skill is my ability to learn. I excel at tasks which take a lot of thought to figure out and I love the challenge of thinking outside the norms to come up with new and unique solutions to any and all problems. I live by a philosophy of taking a fundamental approach to most things. I prefer to create a strong foundation of knowledge in regard to a particular subject from which I can grow upwards rapidly. For example, when I wanted to be an engineer, I began by studying how atoms and molecules interact, the fundamental laws of physics. All knowledge after that can then be built on that basic foundation.How this translates to my career is that I learn not just my specific job, but the basic function and goal of my company. I also try to learn everyone else's job as well. I figure out how their job affects mine, how mine affects theirs, and what the overall goal of all our jobs combined accomplishes for the company. From this knowledge, I can design around all the other branches, or even cut through some, in order to make something that fits seamlessly into the current company structure.My experience has mostly been in the manufacturing environment, though not entirely focused on manufacturing itself. I was brought into my first full-time job after college with almost no first-hand knowledge of quality control and yet I managed to create, from scratch, a robust Quality Assurance program that cut overall customer returns by 50%.My roles also included implementing a brand-new, barcode-based inventory system that involved a minor amount of programming and a major amount of training for employees who were unaccustomed to the technology.Despite not knowing much about these things beforehand, I was able to quickly absorb the new information and adapt to produce systems that fully met the company's needs as efficiently as possible.