I finished a thing!

I got licensed for work, which involved passing a set of three tests. I’m thrilled to be done, and I’m eager to spend a little time trying to make sense of the process.

So… This is a “fwiw” kind of share, and it’s a little inside baseball, but I wanted to offer an account of my studying process (and any takeaways I’m gathering as I go).

My getting licensed was a goal that our whole team agreed upon: it’s a step toward shaping the business the way we want. I had the space, time, and flexibility to make this happen on my own terms, though that doesn’t mean it was a simple feat.

One teammate was actually just ahead of me in the process, and by the time I finished, another teammate was right behind me. That sense of being “in it” with others was helpful, and I tried to enjoy the momentum coming and going both ways. But being able to share our experiences was no replacement for getting ourselves through the thing: we each still had to put in the work, mostly independently.

I don’t have a neat way to summarize the whole journey. Parts of it were very, very hard. Sometimes this was because the task itself could be challenging, but sometimes this was because of other pressures or projects going on in the rest of my day job.

Sometimes it had more to do with my physical or mental health and circumstances than anything that was strictly work.

And other parts of it were very, very easy. There were rhythms. I was able to flow with the tasks and find steady progress. By the last test, the logic of the material seemed more accessible and straightforward than it ever had. I was speaking the language of the exam more quickly and easily.

There are things I want to remember about the process. I know that there are experiences sprinkled in here that I will be able to mine as resources, things I can call on later in life for strength or wisdom.

(Because goodness knows I’m not going to find the meaning I seek inside what was essentially a gate-keeping hurdle. Ha!)

Just a note on terminology: the three tests I’m talking about are the Securities Industry Essentials exam (“the SIE”), the Series 7 exam (“the 7”), and the Series 66 exam (“the 66”). Passing them is required for certain financial industry professionals to become properly registered.

So here’s how things went down. In January 2022, I started studying for the SIE. I passed it on my first attempt in May, with 5 months of prep.

Summer 2022, I mistakenly started studying for the 66. We got tangled up in the office, thinking I’d be able to forego the 7 and then thinking the order of the two mattered less than it did. I don’t remember how we got confused, and it doesn’t really matter now. After a few months working my way down the wrong path, I hit the brakes.

Meanwhile, a depressive spell was descending. I had a few false starts with studying in the fall and early winter of 2022, trying to get into the 7. With help and support (of the familial and workplace and professional varieties), I accepted where I was mentally, and I let things rest for a few months.

I restarted in earnest in January 2023. I filled my toolbox and tried to go about things more intentionally and mindfully. I tried to stay kind to myself and curious about the process as it unfolded.

No one was going to give me a cookie for barreling through. There would not be a trophy waiting when I exited the testing center. As I knew from passing the SIE, the most I could expect to be handed for my efforts was a streaky printout to be unceremoniously embossed by a stranger in a windowless room.

Instead, I embraced the scenic route. I was not some cadet at boot camp: I was an artist on retreat, studying the landscape of my own progress.

It was interesting! Things did move steadily, though not always smoothly. There were times where I was out of studying mode for 2 or 5 or 3 weeks at a time. These were unplanned breaks from studying, but they were unavoidable—and completely understandable. And I could tell, from my notes*, exactly what had happened along the way.

At one point, our whole office was preoccupied with a process of reorganization. It took more work than we had imagined, and it just needed to be done, right then.

At another, my whole household was ill with something, one person after another.

In the end, I passed the 7 on my first attempt, after 7 months of prep.

Then I took a long weekend “off” before turning to the last exam. I passed that sucker within 6 weeks.

To recap, the tests took me 5 months, 7 months, and then 1 month plus change. These were the active stretches of “focused” study and preparation. You’ll notice this is a total of 13 months, across parts of 23 months. The whole journey started in January 2022, so I’m looking at just about two calendar years start to finish.

But the first two concentrated stretches were not consecutive. And there’s a lot of mess and pain in between the two, both work-related and not. Then there’s very little accounting for the amazing momentum and ease I found toward the end of the process. It’s nothing short of magic, and I received it with open arms as the gift it was.

I offer all this you, for whatever it’s worth. For those in the industry or facing your own set of hurdles, this story isn’t going to read as a “how to.” It’s just a “how it was.” The parts of my process that I would recommend trying are kind of narrow.

Instead, I suppose I’m trying to say that I got the thing done, and I did it in a way that only I could. And that’s fine. And maybe this will give you a sense of permission to do your thing the way that only you can. It probably won’t look like anyone else’s—and you probably won’t be able to look back and say, “That all happened exactly how I thought it would!”

And that’s fine.

It’s okay for things to just look like what like they look like. It’s okay to be wherever you are right now. There’s no better place to build from than here and now.

Is this reflection anticlimactic? Maybe. That’s fine, too. We make sense of things as we go, for whatever it’s worth.

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* Some practical tools and approaches that really helped me:

• Ditching the legal pads for a low-tech but more-tech notebook that uses erasable pens: As I moved through the textbooks, I was able to scan my notes, review from PDFs as needed, and wipe the pages clean before moving on to a new section. I could name and add tags to the documents to stay organized and keep the materials focused on what was most important.
• Keeping logs: I picked up this habit as a writer during graduate school. When I mention “pace,” I don’t just mean my sense of progress. I mean that I logged enough data about my work to help set and adapt my expectations as I went. For most study sessions, I logged the time and the number of pages I covered in the text. I kept track of how long the quizzes took me to complete, so that by the end of the process I could make sure I was moving through at a rate that would fit comfortably into the timed environment of the actual exams. I made notes about where I was sitting when I studied, whether I was listening to music, and anything else that might help point me toward what was working—and what wasn’t!—in my studying life.
• Stacking activities: This is another writerly “hack” I practiced during grad school. To help activities reinforce each other, I’d find pairs of things I wanted or needed to do and smush them together. The appeal of getting to paint my nails would help convince me to slow down, get my butt in a chair, and crack the dang textbook. My nails have to dry? Might as well keep going into this next section. When it was time to take a quiz, I could load one on my laptop in tablet mode and prop it up on the elliptical in my basement. It was a chance to get my brain and my heartrate going! Sure, some of this has the chance of veering into multitasking nonsense, so be sure 1) that the two activities actually make sense as a pair and 2) that pairing them is still worth it given any tradeoffs of trying to put them together.
• Incorporating treats and breaks: I kept track of my pace as I went, and I didn’t blink at buying myself a nice coffee, a pastry, or lunch out on those days where I had more intense study sessions. Celebrating progress is sustainable; holding out for the relief of the finish line is not. I hope you can remember that as you embark on your own audacious and attainable goals. 🙏

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