You know that feeling… the one which tells you that you’ve done something really well. That feeling when you congratulate yourself on a job well done because you know it was a masterpiece. Not the word ‘masterpiece’ which I use as a catchall for everything I create, but a genuine success. That’s how I felt after taking my Financial Planning Practice (R06) exam. This was the last exam I needed for my diploma.
I knew I passed that shit like a pro. The questions were easy, predictable and my preparation was good. I answered all the questions in detail and didn’t have any trouble with 90% of the exam.
However, 6 weeks later I got my results. It was a fail. In
Big.
Fucking.
Uppercase.
Letters.

FAIL

I scored 80 points, but needed 82 to pass. I was surprised. I don’t understand how it’s possible that I only scored 50% of the points.
I googled around to find out what I could do and requested a re-mark. It’s worth doing if it was a narrow fail (failed by 1-3 points) so they might change it to a narrow pass. I paid £82 for that lottery and need to wait for up to 5 weeks to find out if my result will change or not. If it’s still a fail, I’ll re-sit the exam in July. I’ll pass it eventually.

The next day I had plans to go to a salsa party in South-End. Unfortunately my ride was cancelled because they got sick. No car, no party. I didn’t feel like dancing anyway so I was relieved.
I spent some time procrastinating on Facebook, one thing led to another and I made new plans for the night and headed out to the movies to meet up with Blue Eyes and Vamos-A-La-Playa. 😀
There once was a uni student who was very late to his lecture. He quickly wrote down two assignments from the blackboard just before the class ended. Two weeks later he went to the professor and gave him the answers. The professor asked what he was giving him because he never tasked the students with any homework. The professor looked at the solutions and realized that the student had solved two impossible problems – two questions which were perceived to be impossible to solve. That kid’s name was Stephen Hawking.
That’s a story I remembered as I was in the cinema watching the opening credits of The Theory of Everything. I heard the above story about 8 years ago in Nashville, TN. It was some pep-talk about overcoming adversity and doing the impossible. In this case doing something because you were never told it was impossible.
My mind wandered and I thought of the summer of 2007 and all the wonderful people I met in the States.
The movie was really good. I highly recommend it. It was sadiful – sad and beautiful at the same time. The sad part was the way the disease was taking away so much from Mr Hawking’s life, the beauty was what the man accomplished despite his disability. In a way it was empowering. The world needs a bit more of that.
I was in a fairly good mood after the movie. My exam failure seemed like such a first world problem in contrast. Let’s face it, things don’t always go my way. And if they did, life would be so boring.