Hey everyone,
I have about 50 days left until my exam and I’d have to say that my progress has disappointed me yet again and that I’ll be cramming in the material towards the end of next month in the hopes of passing my fourth professional examination. I wouldn’t call the effort an utter failure as there have been some improvement over that of last fall, since I’ve finished reading all the material and I plan to go over twice – something I wasn’t able to do last time. However, I haven’t gotten around to doing very many problems and that’s really where I do the bulk of my preparation. I have a chance to salvage my plans if I can just finish up the 289 sample problems by the end of the month – that way I’ll have the rest of May to review.
I think realistically I’m in OK shape for now, but it didn’t have to be this way and I could have easily been ready for the test already if I had spent just 2 hours a day studying. Although I’m still maintaining steady progress into Sociology, I’m still wasting massive amounts of time on the internet reading the news, especially on the weekends or when I get back home from work. I used to have trouble keeping up with the news, but now I’ll sometimes just sit there for hours at a time, reading article after article, waiting for good news on the economy or some technological breakthrough that would make our lives just a little bit easier. Unfortunately, I feel that it’s so easy to get stuck into the mindset where you’re just waiting for things to get better. I think a lot of us have that feeling where we’re waiting for that moment where we’ll be free of all these distractions so that we’ll finally have the liberty to pursue the things we want to pursue.
I can tell you as a young adult, that unless you were born into a life of privilege that moment will never arrive. There will always be things lurking in the background that you’ll never be able to control – ominous trends that forebode a collapse of the economy – or maybe the fear that one day you or a family member will succumb to disease, or that all the money you’re saving for retirement will be swept away during the bursting of some asset bubble in the future, and that everything you had will be gone in an instant. I think the most practical thing you can do in this case is take a reasonable approach to risk – if you take too many precautions, you’ll use up too many resources trying to prevent things that might never happen. On the other hand, if you don’t take any precautions at all, you leave yourself exposed to casualties that are easily preventable. I think the hard part is keeping track of everything and figuring out which risks to hedge against and which ones to accept.
Sometimes, I worry that I’ll get into some horrible crash during a bike ride and that all the time I spent training would end up being a waste, or that the 50,000 hours I plan to spend studying Mathematics will never lead to anything significant, and that I should instead be spending time with my friends, socializing, or raising a family. The flood of responsibilities that emerge after entering the workforce can be overwhelming, and I keep thinking in my mind that “as soon as I take care of X, I’ll finally be able to start on Math.” However, there will never be a perfect moment where you can pursue your passion, unhindered by trivial obligations. You really have to follow your dreams despite all the chaos around you – there will certainly be setbacks and you will never have a perfectly smooth path towards your goals, and over the course of decades you’re certain to experience some catastrophic event – and when that happens, you just have to keep trying.