Smarty Pants

a friend texted me “you’re just too damn smart” the other day after i had shared with him the news that i passed the tax portion of my cpa exam (my hardest section) and when i read it i had to laugh out loud because you see, nobody has ever really called me smart before. usually the adjectives that are used to describe me are hard-working, or diligent and organized, i was even called simple-minded recently and on a more superficial level, i’ve been called cute and sweet but never ever smart. jon was always known as the smart one of the family, the one who barely studied for the sat’s but managed to get a high enough score that it was even mentioned in our local paper. jon was the one my parents would mention when the topic of what college your kid was attending would come up (a very popular topic among chinese parents) while i toiled away at the local state school. even during high school when we had the choice between taking calculus ab or bc, i initially chose bc but then even though i ended up getting the highest score on our first test, i was so convinced that there was no way i would be cut out for calculus bc that i immediately dropped out of the class and went down to the ab class. this has always stayed with me because i had so little faith in my abilities that i would always choose the easier road when possible instead of setting myself up for failure.

my strength was that i was very disciplined and was the one in class who would take copious notes and made sure i had a brand new five subject notebook (always college-lined) to start the semester and always did all of my homework. i was the same in college and did well enough to graduate with honors (at state mind you) but even so, in my advanced accounting classes, i always felt a step behind and was the last one in my group to understand the problem and the one playing catch up. however all of that sort of changed when i started working in the real world and realized that hey, maybe i do understand this and actually much better than lots of people i’ve worked with that even i surprised myself sometimes.

so you can see why that text message was so unexpected to me and well, according to my cpa instructor, the exam is not so much a test of how smart you are but a test of discipline. and i guess now all that discipline is really paying off because all those hours spent studying is working and i'm so close to my goal that i almost can't think about it too much for fear that something bad will happen along the way but for now, i plan on just chugging along until i can get that elusive three letters behind my name.