This won’t surprise folks who knew me back then, but I wasn’t a good test taker in school.  I didn’t get nervous or freak out about them - I usually just didn’t care… Fortunately (maybe the wrong word choice…), this changed after I left college and had to sit examinations for various certifications, such as the PMP, or ACP-620. I found they made me nervous… I was taking MONTHS to prepare for them, writing out dozens, no, hundreds, of flash cards and drilling them until I saw them in my sleep.

On the day of the exam I would be anxious… extra energy making me jittery and hard to focus.  The 2-4 hours stuck in a booth clicking answers felt like forever, and waiting for confirmation of a pass took longer.

Sidebar:

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of taking one of these exams you used to have to go to a testing center, sign in, hand over all your stuff and then sit in a booth with a computer.  You’d answer all the questions over 2-4 hours, then click “done”.  You wouldn’t know your results until you went to the front and the proctor gave you a printout with “pass” or “fail”. The time between clicking “done” and seeing that paper was pure agony.

You can now take these exams at home, which requires you to show videos of your space to prove you aren’t cheating (finding a clean spot is hard!). Once you click “Done”, however, you’ll get results VERY quickly.  But that gap still feels like forever.

Additionally, I earned my Masters in IT Management several years after earning my BS while working full time… and pulled almost straight A+’s the entire time.

For years I’ve been trying to figure out the difference… and I think I finally have it figured out - I care now.  For me the exams in school were compulsory, something I had to do… so I did, just… poorly. Now, however, they’re optional, something I am opting into.  I’m choosing to subject myself to hours of lectures, reading assignments and practice environments. I’m choosing to memorize how workflows or automations or queries work.  I”m choosing to do all that instead of relaxing, or playing video games, or doing anything else.

And because I’m choosing to do all this, I’m nervous. Nervous that I’ve wasted my time, or won’t do well, or won’t have learned what I wanted to.  I think it’s that personal buy-in that’s made the biggest difference.  Once I decided to become invested in something, it had value to me.

Current Me wishes that past Me had figured that out… but I don’t think I would have. I didn’t have the desire to do well on the test or in (most of) my classes. While I do suffer from a bad case of “what if” when I think about it, honestly I’m just glad I’ve figured it out now.

Understanding why I care makes it easier for me to flip a switch and make something important. For example, while I may not REALLY care about that certification, I do care about what the process of earning it teaches me.  While I may not REALLY care about most of the content, I do care about the portions I know I’ll apply.

It’s been an interesting revelation, and one that I’m glad I finally made.