7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 16
I was 19 and a bit unobservant. I signed up for what I thought was personal finance. I wanted to learn how to balance my checkbook. I ended up in fundamentals of business finance, learning bond valuation.
I did what I always did in college — I winged it. Showed up, skated through, and crammed at the end. Pretty sure I got a D. I was happy with it.
In retrospect, I’ve worked a corporate job for almost twenty years. The financials aren’t that hard to understand. If I had taken some focused time early that semester, I would have learned the material and been fine. It wasn’t a smarts thing. It was a wing-it thing that almost bit me.
I leaned on talent for most of my life. Smart kid, underachieving student. A 2.87 GPA in my undergrad, mostly propped up by passing all of my music courses.
Then I went back for my master’s degree and decided to get my act together. I studied. I did the assignments. I prepared instead of crammed. I graduated with a 3.95.
The only thing that changed was the work ethic.
I think most people romanticize the idea of working well under pressure. I think that’s nonsense. Very few of us actually work well under pressure we manufactured through our own laziness. We just convince ourselves we do because we survived it. Surviving isn’t thriving. And the work that comes out of a last-minute scramble shows it.
If I could go back and tell the kid in that finance class one thing, it would be this: the difference between a 2.87 and a 3.95 wasn’t talent. It was deciding to stop paying the wing-it tax.
David Willis 