It's been awhile since I was a student, and back to school gives me mixed feelings. On the last midterm, which was the first, I made lots of careless mistakes on reading questions. Attention to details is quite important for an accountant, I think, so I've started to get a feeling that what if I couldn't do it? I mean what if things wouldn't go as planned… again… and… again, what is it that I can rely on?

When I made up my mind that I would pursue CFA a year ago, I did anticipate overcoming obstacles, but I guess I've not anticipated enough. People always say that you have to give up something to gain something; in economics terms, it has a fancy name called opportunity cost. Back when I took my first economics class, I answered every opportunity-cost-related question right, but I didn't understand what it means. Now I do, but the question is, does it worth it? It's always difficult to evaluate or estimate something when there is a great amount of uncertainty involved, for example, start-up businesses, pharmaceutical companies, and mostly importantly, major decisions in your life. It's the same thing as running a new product line; when and where do you stop your loss? How do you know that the estimate point is a better alternative than continuing to bear losses, knowing one day you will start to produce earnings? Well, I don't know what my answer is. In fact, I've started to elicit an interest in finding out what a faith is. People who know me know that it's such an irony because I'm very skeptical. I guess this is probably an important lesson in my life that I must know how to deal with failures and fix them as the time is running out, but most often there is no way to know if it's accomplishable other than just to believe; learn how to live with uncertainty yet not terrified by it.

Few days ago I read an article about a mathematician (if I remember correctly) defending his statistical model on predicting the winning chance on the championship of given baseball teams. Yet he stated that the drawback of any prediction model is on estimating players' potentials. From an unknown to a hottest rising star among Yankee's players, Jian-Ming Wang has worked hard to earn his recognition and accomplishment, and I believe at some point in time he ought to doubt whether he would succeed because of the unknown to the outcome. However, If he never had faith in himself from the beginning and secure this faith with countless hours of practices, I don't think he would be who he is today. Faith and uncertainty, maybe they are the twins from the beginning.