I hated studying so much as a student, yet now as an adult I've started it on my own. The trigger was feeling that knowledge for the Takken (real-estate license) and FP (financial planner) exams would help me understand investing and real-estate topics.
Why study now, at this timing?
While researching investing and household finances, I realized I only understood taxes, real estate and insurance in fragments. More than getting the qualifications themselves, I wanted to organize my knowledge systematically, so I decided to study Takken and FP at the same time. Recently, Level 3 bookkeeping has joined them, and before I knew it, my desk was covered in textbooks.
The difference from my school days
Nobody is forcing me, so I can look into anything I don't understand until I'm satisfied, and because I can connect things to my own life, it sinks in astonishingly well. In school the goal was to memorize; now the goal is to use. That is the big difference, I feel.
- Read the textbook for just 30 minutes in the morning
- Solve a past-exam app during the commute
- Review the week's material all at once on the weekend
I started bookkeeping too (and mostly fall asleep)
As I progressed with Takken and FP, I thought it would be more interesting to understand money flows at the ledger level, so I bought a Level 3 bookkeeping textbook too. Once journal entries (the rules for recording transactions in books) start to make sense, a company's financial statements stop being just a list of numbers and gradually become readable as a story.
Still, studying after work is also a fight against sleepiness. Honestly, there are quite a few nights where I spread out my notebook with determination and found myself asleep on the textbook... Even so, believing “steady effort changes the future,” I resume from where I left off the next morning.
学びも大事よね
Summary
More than whether I can pass, I find it fun in itself that the resolution with which I see things keeps rising through studying. At this pace, I'd like to reach out to relearning other fields too.
KAZUKIN Rating
- 📚 Motivation for adult study — ★★★★★
- 🏠 Ability to run Takken, FP and bookkeeping in parallel — ★★★★☆
- 😴 Rate of falling asleep on the textbook — ★★★★☆
- 🧾 Feeling of financial statements looking like a story — ★★★★☆
- 🌅 Ability to resume the next morning — ★★★★★