#91 Half CA giving us CA Goals?
This latest web series streaming free on Amazon Mini TV revived some CA aspirations and important life lessons. Let's look at it together today!
The only time we all start finding CAs is during Tax filing and seek advice from them to help us save on some bucks. For companies, they just turn towards these folks for audits and getting their finances vetted. What exactly we need? A signature which gives assurance to the government bodies that we are on track. Seems like a big economic responsibility on few folks but they have their own challenges to reach this level, right? You ask any CA friend, they literally have no time from Jan to Mar of the year but otherwise they live a pretty chill life. Perhaps, this struggle is depicted in this latest web series ‘Half CA’
Let me admit that I took a while to watch this web series, I tried thrice until I could complete this web series. What made me take so long was that they presented this profession as highly glamourized which put me off in Episode 1 but then I just completed the series for this blog :P. Just kidding, this series eventually gave some life lessons which hold true not only for this profession in question but for others too.
Indian kids grow up in a competitive environment and this competitiveness might work till your school days but with the limited choice of streams we have in higher education, we all turn back to our seniors for career advice. And a studious kid tends to opt for one of the most competitive exams in their streams. CA is one of the well-recognized yet toughest exams in India for commerce students and I bet 8 out of 10 commerce students think to pursue it once in their initial career journey.
Well, I was no exception and right after my 12th Board exams, my first answer to everyone was I want to become a CA (Today I feel that my response had no basis back then except the fact that it opens your doors to the ‘Money World’). Since, I was aware about the uncertainity attached with the course, I planned to pursue a full-time graduation alongside. Today I am not a CA but a successful Risk Manager. And yes, I quit CA during my IPCC stage. Before you think that my reason of quitting was my unsucessful attempts, let me tell you that I cleared my CPT & IPCC in 1st attempt and still chose to gave up on the journey despite my parents futile efforts to convince me otherwise. My move to give up was a well tested one and before quitting, I interned at a CA firm and got views from many successful CA folks. That limited journey made me realize two things: one that the money world has many faces and CA is just a part of it, my aspirations didn’t align with the path I was on and second, CA that time was just a hyped course with outdated syllabus and no vaue add which further offended me.
You know, this outside world doesn’t respect a Half CA much and for many that becomes an intelligence check metric for the applicant. And there are many folks who take it so personally that they keep trying and giving back to back attempts to get these two words prefixed against their names “CA”. I am sure, those who feel like this is the biggest achievement of their lives and feel they have aced the world. But is this the lean or end of their life struggle? Maybe not and this web series has beautifully showcased multiple perspectives around such degrees, be it IAS, IPS, CA, MBA or any other govt competitive exam. Sharing some of the key insights today:
Step out of your Comfort Zone
New City, New friends, New Job; everything new makes you somewhat out of place and you take a while to accept or go with it. When a new shoe also causes a shoe bite then how can we expect these life changes to be smooth? Life is often a game of finding balances through small adjustments and making the place a bit more familiar to oneself.
Like Mumbai was not like Nasik for the protagonist ans she struggled a bit to find her way through the new city. In the same manner, we all need some time and some help to sway our way through the changes.
Failure and Fun are not connected
Finding faults in self is a common behaviour we all do, whenever we are hit by a short-term failure or we feel stuck. We start by creating boundaries around ourselves, limiting all our extra-curricular activities. Remember your Board exams time when you shut down your phone, don’t talk to friends and just surround yourself between books. Well,this is a usual behavior of all CA aspirants I know.
Little do they know that failures and fun have no correlation and one can still achieve goals by finding a balance or healthy boundaries between their personal life and goals. No one needs to put their life on hold for fulfilling their goals.
Options help you understand ‘What not to do’
Opportunity is like a flowing river and this life gives us many choices and options all throughout. A few are afraid to try out options and settle themselves with a tried and tested path while others are always to open to try and find their niche. The idea is to never stop or control yourself from testing the waters to trying something that looks appealing to you, because often that holding back crops up regret later in life.
Had I not tried CA, I would have regretted that I missed the chance to pursue and be successful. But pursuing it made me understand that this is not what I aim to do further.
Distractions should be Written Off
We all are surrounded by distractions and social media being one of them. Why I said that? Because overtime wehn I analyzed my cost vs benefit through my time and efforts spent on social media, I found that it just puts me into a loop of overconsuming content and after a while, the value addition diminishes to zero. How did I figure this out? It didn’t happen when someone just came over and told me that social media is a time burner, in fact that happened when I aimed to minimize my screen time and such platforms were a major consumers of my screen time.
In a nutshell, to write off/ remove or minimize your distractions, follow this three-step guide: Identify sources » Analyze their impact » Decide on your future course
Once you succeed, No one remembers the count of your Failure
There was a scene in this series where a guy was struggling to clear his final CA exam despite multiple attempts. Feeling disheartened, he spoke to another folk who was happily preparing for his 18th attempt and he said that once this prefix gets attached to your name, then no one would ask the count of attempts. That incident hit home and I was reminded that our failure is personal but our success is public.
No degree is the zenith to your goals, it’s just the fast-tracked beginning
Time and again I have stressed on the fact that degrees can help you gain required theoretical knowledge and skills, but unless you jump into the real world, you won’t know how to put your learnings to use. A CA is not just for filing our taxes, or an MBA grad is not just to build strategies, there are various use cases and problems that these professionals can solve and we should not box them based on our limited uses. Also, for a professional to turn a veteran, he has to struggle or face multi-faceted challenges along the way.
Being an MBA grad, I had to put some time into learning coding and creating dashboards which was neither my core competency nor a required skill but a good to have.
What are your thoughts on the web series and this profession? If you enjoyed reading today's blog, then don't forget to share this with your CA friends.