mk17 wrote:
SpareTime wrote:
mk17 wrote:
Look, this program isn’t for the faint of heart or the sissy who’s gonna cry when he fails.
Ugh…this kind of ridiculous comment is the sort of machismo self-aggrandizing bullcrap that is better left unsaid. You’re not calling it like it is…this isn’t the army. If there’s a program that’s built for “sissies” or “people who cry when they fail” it’s one where you can retake the exam as many times as you want.
Why would it be better left unsaid? It’s advice that will keep people from wasting years of their lives in something they might not be cut out for. So you can retake it, but it doesn’t get easier with subsequent retakings, the pressure piles on and you see your peers move ahead of you. Some people can retake it over and over again and never pass. I lament the use of the term sissy because it’s associated with macho people, but you have to be mentally tough to get to the end. That’s probably the greatest lesson I learned from the CFA program.
And greenman, it’s a compliment. I respect how you always tell it like it is.
One of my biggest pet peeves is people who love to tell people that they “tell it like it is”, but really they’re just being jerks because they lack the social skills to be honest without being rude.
Here is somebody who’s trying to deal with anxiety regarding exam results, and so he’s reaching out to fellow candidates and charterholders for support. As I find is way too common on this forum, he was greeted with people telling him (to paraphrase) to suck it up. The poster may very well have gotten 100% on the exam, and yet people are telling him to quit the whole program so they can talk about how incredibly resilient they are and how they’re a straight shooter.
Learning to give somebody unpleasant advice in a way that is understanding, yet honest and forthcoming, is a social skill that most people learn in grade school. I’ve found in the college of engineering, and on these forums as well, that people forego this skill so they can lord their own performance over others. Case in point, Greenman belittling my opinion because I’m a Level I Candidate (for the next 6 days, for better or for worse).
Long story short, it’s not the job of anonymous people on the internet to tell FinKid he needs to just quit and pursue something else. If that’s something that he needs to be told, it’s something that needs to be told to him by somebody who actually knows him and is familiar with the type of advice he actually needs. Our job is to provide support vis a vis his anxiety waiting for the results. All this talk about being a sissy or the implications that the CFA is the most difficult program on earth are really just ways to self-aggrandize under the guise of “telling it like it is”.
It reminds me of the thread where a candidate with a very different and unusual (to us) method of surname and name was asking a question about his passport and exam ticket, and many people responded only that he was going to fail the exam because he couldn’t even figure out the rules. This community can be extraordinarily unsupportive, particularly considering it’s only real purpose is to provide support to fellow candidates and charterholders. Oddly enough, it seems like the most supportive people here are often charterholders - probably because they no longer harbor the insecurity that many of the candidates here seem to have.
