The Life and Little Lies Behind the Letters

CFA, MBA, and the Question We Rarely Ask

There’s a quiet moment I’ve seen many times.

Someone has bought the CFA books, started Level I, felt the loneliness of unstructured self-study, and quietly put the calculator back in the drawer. The next thought arrives almost automatically:

“Maybe I should just do an MBA instead.”

On the surface, it sounds like a rational pivot: if one path feels dry and isolating, choose the one with classmates, cases, and a campus. Underneath, though, that question often hides a much better one that almost never gets asked:

“What am I actually suited for?”

Until that question is faced, CFA vs MBA is just a change of scenery. The deeper pattern remains untouched.

The wrong starting question

“Which will open more doors, CFA or MBA?”

“Which will get me a better job? A higher salary?”

These are understandable questions, but they treat credentials like lottery tickets. They assume that if you just pick the right ticket and endure the grind, the rest of your life will obediently fall into line.

The reality is harsher and, paradoxically, more hopeful.

A CFA doesn’t automatically put you in front of the right problems or the right people. An MBA doesn’t guarantee leadership any more than buying running shoes makes you an athlete. Both are tools the world happens to recognize. Neither can tell you whether the life that tends to come with them is one you can actually inhabit without slowly suffocating.

Until suitability is on the table – your temperament, your interests, your circumstances, the kind of responsibility you want to carry – debating CFA vs MBA is like arguing about which pair of shoes is better without asking where you’re walking.

The loneliness of the CFA path

The CFA Program is unusually solitary. You buy the books. You carve out evenings and weekends. You sit in libraries while people you care about wonder why you’re never really present. You fail or you pass, alone.

There is fellowship, eventually. Local CFA societies can be genuine communities: thoughtful talks, people who care about pensions and markets and ethics rather than just “finance” as a lifestyle. But most candidates never feel that during Level I. They’re counting practice questions and caffeine, not friends.

Many start the CFA for reasons that are quietly off-key:

  • “If I get the letters, maybe a ‘proper’ firm will poach me.”

  • “If I pass Level III, I’ll finally feel legitimate.”

  • “If I collect one more designation, I won’t have to face how stuck I feel.”

It rarely works like that. The CFA tends to work best when:

  • You are already in a role where the body of knowledge matters

  • Your firm genuinely values the CFA designation, pays for it, and supports your study time, including generous time off and leaving you alone on your study days

  • You can see how it deepens your judgment rather than just your LinkedIn headline

Without that context, the Program can become a private arms race against yourself. You’re not just studying bonds and options; you’re trying to outrun a rising internal panic that you’re behind.

The MBA: not just three more letters

MBAs, at their best, are not just degrees. They are social worlds: classmates, alumni networks, late-night conversations that change how you see organizations and yourself. A solid MBA can induct you into a tribe that quietly opens doors for decades.

But even here, the suitability question is unforgiving.

An MBA is not a generic antidote to boredom. It is a specific immersion in a certain way of thinking: markets, strategy, organizations, power. Before committing, it’s worth asking:

  • Do I want to spend two years immersed in this, or am I simply trying to escape my current job?

  • Do I want to lead people and organizations, or do I secretly hope the degree will do that part for me?

  • Am I prepared for the first question people will ask: “MBA from where?” and all the hierarchy that implies?

An MBA can widen your world or simply give you another polished identity to hide inside. The difference lies less in the school than in the honesty you bring to why you’re there.

The arms race and the pile of letters

In cities like Toronto, New York, London, it’s not unusual to meet people with stacks of credentials: CFA plus MBA; P.Eng plus CFA; CPA plus CBV plus CFA; sometimes another master’s or two threaded in for good measure.

One hard-earned designation is already a serious commitment. When the pile grows taller and taller, something else is often happening:

  • Avoidance disguised as ambition

  • A belief that another qualification will finally silence impostor feelings

  • A quiet terror of choosing a lane and being judged on how you live it, not how you studied for it

There’s also a practical truth that seldom gets named:

A degree is yours for life. Professional letters can be taken away.

If you stop paying your dues, you lose the right to use them. If you face an ethics investigation, you can find yourself in regulatory limbo for months or years, wondering how a panel of peers will judge your worthiness to keep the letters you sacrificed so much to earn. That’s not a reason to avoid the designations. But it is a reason to admit that they are not simply badges of honour. They are ongoing obligations tied to standards you are supposed to live, not just memorize.

When the arms race kicks in, that nuance disappears. It becomes about keeping up with the colleague next door or the stranger on LinkedIn, rather than asking the far more frightening question: What kind of life are these letters pulling me toward, and do I actually want it?

Sunk costs and shrinking dreams

Once you’ve poured years into a CFA, an MBA, or both, it’s easy to fall into a quiet trap:

“I’ve invested so much in this path; I have to make it work.”

So you shoehorn your career into the designation. You stay in a narrow lane because leaving would “waste” all those exams, all that tuition, all those weekends.

Meanwhile, a different dream – often quieter, often more human – slowly starves.

Maybe you always wanted to work closer to clients, or to teach, or to lead a small team deeply instead of a large one shallowly. Maybe you care more about stewardship than deal flow. Maybe something not even related to finance: you dream of building and racing mountain bikes from a sustainable farm in rural British Columbia. But each year the letters on your card grow heavier, and suitability becomes something you assume you lost when you chose the credential.

The paradox is that the very discipline that got you through the program can keep you locked in a life that no longer fits. You know how to grind. You don’t yet know how to listen for the small inner voice that says, “This is wrong for me,” and trust it before your body does that job for you through insomnia, illness, or burnout.

Risk, ethics, and what credentials are for

In theory, the point of professional designations is simple: to protect the public. To signal that the person making decisions about capital, clients, or patients has met a standard and is accountable to something beyond their own self-interest.

If your ideal day involves hiding alone with Excel in a far-off cubicle, never speaking to clients or colleagues, it’s worth asking why you’re chasing a client-facing credential at all. Why memorize “Duties to Clients and Prospective Clients” if you intend to avoid both?

Similarly, if the MBA appeals mainly as a shield or a brand, not as a responsibility to use that training in service of something beyond your own advancement, it’s useful to admit that early. Otherwise you risk spending two years – and six figures – perfecting a story about “impact” and “leadership” that you have no intention of embodying.

In both cases, the heart of the matter is the same: credentials are supposed to be a means of serving others wisely. If you never intend to face people, only spreadsheets, there may be gentler ways to earn a living.

The quiet “yes” of suitability

Underneath all of this lives something far less theatrical than “follow your passion.” It is the steady, unglamorous work of listening for suitability.

Suitability is that almost inaudible “yes” inside when a path, a role, a city, a team feels aligned with who you are and what you can genuinely offer. Not perfect. Not painless. But right enough that your conscience, your body, and your future self can live with it.

You can feel suitability when you enter a firm that truly values the CFA and gives you problems worthy of that effort, rather than treating the charter as wallpaper. You can feel it in an MBA classroom when the conversations wake something up in you rather than merely impressing your parents. You can feel it in a smaller role, in a quieter place, where the trade-offs are honest and your nights are mostly your own.

Credentials can support that kind of life. They can also suffocate it, especially when chosen as armour against doubt rather than as a tool in service of work that matters to you.

Back to the real question

CFA or MBA is not, in the end, a technical question. It is a human one.

  • What kind of responsibilities do you want?

  • What kinds of people do you want to serve?

  • How much ambiguity and scrutiny can you carry without becoming someone you no longer recognize?

And are you prepared to let your degrees and designations sit in the background while you build a life that your younger self – the one who first opened the textbook or walked onto campus – would recognize as worthy?

The letters after your name can be honourable. They can also be little lies you tell yourself to avoid facing larger truths.

The work, now, is not to collect more of them, but to decide what, and whom, they are ultimately for.