Jeanie is a NINJA CPA Blogger.

I had a very wise friend Jennifer who always said, ‘this too shall pass’. The good, the bad, and the ugly, this all will pass.

And eventually, I too will pass all four sections of the exam.

I am looking for energy as I move through REG in preparation for my May 4th exam. It was SO far away when I scheduled it and it is now seemingly around the corner.

Discipline is so important, but so is the quality of the time that I put into studying. I was recopying the NINJA Notes last week and had to turn back the page three times to see what an acronym meant.

After the third time, I put the notes aside for another time as there was no point in just copying the words if they were not actually getting inside my brain.

Part of this long process for me has been learning what does not work and I can tell you that listening to lectures while worrying about or being focused on something else just to get through them and ‘do the time’ does not work. That ended up being a bunch of wasted hours that I will never get back.

I also learned that I could easily memorize the correct answers to the MCQs without really learning very much at all. That would be wonderful if and only if the exam was based on the exact MCQs that I was preparing with.

This weekend I was helping my husband build our greenhouse and trying to determine how I could get some study time in at the same time. My tablet in hand, I arrived to help him only to realize that the power saw was louder than Jeff’s voice.

Ah ha. Need to improvise here – I kept playing the chapters and just hit pause each time my husband got near the saw. Was it perfect? No. Was it a way to balance my need and desire to study with my need and desire to help and be a good partner? Heck yeah!

Onward!