157
I have been fascinated with the Universe for as long as I can remember. At the age of 7 I could rattle off the 9 planets (Pluto was still classed as one at the time) – in order - as fluidly as water would cascade over a waterfall. Memory boasts my greatest pride when, back in Primary 6, my form teacher told a few of us in class to scribble down on the whiteboard the planets in our Solar System. I handed the marker back to her not a minute later, beaming, before the rest had even come halfway through.
As I grew older, so did my fascination and knowledge of space: marvelling at how even our Sun, that globe of gaseous flames, being a Type G star, is dwarfed by thousands of stars in our galaxy, in terms of size and luminosity. In the universal context, our local star is but a grain of sand. There are also thousands more tinier stars out there – Type Ks and Ms – which can burn up to 10 times as long as the Sun (which by the way would last 10 billion years), whereas massive Type As and Os would burn out in mere millions of years. To a young mind these were astounding facts.
From there I spread out, going to types of galaxies, black holes, nebulae, neutron stars, white and black dwarfs, super and hypernovae, dark matter, things like that. Of course I didn't touch things like quantum physics; to me these were simply too much. Not only that, I had tremendous interest in prehistory (particularly dinosaurs), and basically general knowledge. To Dunman Secondary's old slogan, "Knowledge, the Torch of Life".
These are all and good, but in today's rat race, they are irrelevant. In business and finance nobody is going to ask you how many parsecs away Alpha Centauri is away from us (which is 1.34), or whether a Diplodocus and a Seismosaurus were one and the same (and they were). In class today I was told that people can be worked like a dog for some good money where knowledge can be a make-or-break factor. Not the aforementioned knowledge though – it's knowledge of the markets, of the economy, of the human state of mind. Lecturers somehow can't stress these enough.
Technical Analysis teaches us how to evaluate trends such that you would be in the know. Whether to buy or sell, hold a long, short, or square position, it's down to how much one understands from what he sees on the screen. Brokers are entrusted with clientele money and are expected to use their judgement and knowledge to grow their portfolios. It's a man-eat-man world, and without the right stuff people will bite the dust sooner than later. It's a scary proposition to even think of considering, but that is life, at least it's the one I am training for. Sometimes I question my decisions, but once they are made, there is no reneging, no backtracking.
Memory and interest are my saving graces. I know I can store an elephant of knowledge in a case no bigger than a football. And oh, there surely must be a reason for me choosing the course I have chosen, and then sticking to it for nearly 2 years. Come on, it's not that hard to sum it all up! I know of persons who bicker about how the school, the course, and the modules suck, but I can never get to grips with why they never dropped out. They retain neither the interest nor the knowledge, yet they stubbornly stick on like superglue. My father has done lots of finance stuff during the span of my life, and I have every intention of following in his footsteps. I want to be in the know, and that's why I am where I am.
If a certain five-year-old with a book and gusto for learning about what lies light-years out in space and what transpired many millions of years ago can remember so much, why can't I? Why not now? Definitely food for thought.
Now my brain has hollowed out. Phew.
Till then!~
