lastyearsfile

Hopefully, the twitter account will allow me to make quick comments about what other accounting bloggers are saying – which I’m usually reading anyways.  It’ll (hopefully) bump their traffic and lead you readers to some more cool content.  And in between all that, I’ll throw in links to interesting stuff I’m reading as well.

Follow me, send me an @ message, tell me what you’re reading whateves.  As for when I get back, I have a few big ideas in the pipeline that I’m looking forward to putting down here.  Subjects include – volunteering for large business consultants on my own terms, learning two new languages (potentially) and the best way to breakdown CAS and IFRS.

Why does it feel like everyone is opting for the Tim Ferris – work at home – web2.0 – social media solution?  Is it really that attractive?  Defending my profession because it happens to take place in a cubicle is annoying.  Does it really sound that awful?  I really don’t get it.  Well I do, I understand what people think of office jobs.  And the similarity between this and my day to day probably doesn’t help – no one wants to end up as a Dilbert cartoon.  So why do people take office jobs?  And once they have them, why do they start sucking?  Does it have to be this way?

You took an office job because it was easy

It’s easy to do the things you’re comfortable with.  Sending out resumes, cold calling businesses asking your family if they know a guy who knows a guy who worked with etc. are all traditional methods of getting a job.  By traditional I mean it’s understood, which means it isn’t scary because it isn’t new.  That’s easy.  It’s a lot harder to do something like Charlie Hoehn did (read the e-book it’s worth your time) and think outside the box.  Doing what everyone else is doing is seductive because it’s supposed to be the “normal” approach.  This may not be the smartest strategy, but it’s definitely the easiest.  A lot of people (myself included) often mistake what’s normal for what’s best.

Doing something repetitive, that’s stupid, is the surest way to start sucking

On top of “being easy” new hires have to contend with the notion that “paying your dues” is somehow admirable and socially accepted as a right of passage.  Seriously?  There is (unfortunately) an unwritten understanding that you have to bust your ass before anyone accepts your opinions.  It’s important to differentiate between busting your ass and “working on stupid things that won’t make you any smarter, stifle your creativity and steal the time you wish you had to produce something your company would actually value.”  The former is important.  The latter is frustrating.

But your managers will say it’s ok.  They will tell you “that’s the way it is.”  That sucks.  It sucks more because they’re right.  That is the way it is.

Congratulations, you suck!

This is why you suck.  You took the easy route and then you accepted conventional wisdom.  Luckily, this isn’t a dead end.  You can work around it.

There is another way…

Try cultivating a lifestyle.  You need something that makes sense to you.  Then you take all the things you do and fit them into that framework.  My job didn’t fit my lifestyle, so I quit.  I like to travel, which is why I asked to start in September even though I quit in July.  I enjoy lifting weights, so I took a personal training course last week.  I like to read, so it’s not uncommon for me to spend over $150 on books each month.

You have to cultivate your own path.  That’s the first part.  Then you work.  Not just on what you’re given.  You need to work on anything you find interesting within the context of your job.  Work on what you like.  Work really hard at it.  It doesn’t matter if no one told you to work on it.  You have to do it anyway.  Don’t worry if you can’t apply what you’re doing immediately.  The point is to find meaning in what you’re doing.  That won’t happen if you aren’t proactive.  Apathy won’t get you anywhere.

Go read magazines, buy some books, make a cool presentation using Prezi (highly recommend getting this, it’s amazing).  Do something.  I started putting together audit files without PEM.  I made everything from scratch. That was my thing.  Then I started subscribing to accounting rss feeds and sending anything important to my boss (because I was already doing it, I became responsible for doing this for the entire firm).

My job is a small aspect of what I like to do.  It’s very possible that I could volunteer at another company within the year, find out they’re way more awesome than my current job and then move there.  That is very possible.  I’m always trying to refine what I’m doing to make it a better “fit.”  That’s a continuous process.

After I started looking at things this way, my job didn’t really matter anymore.  It didn’t matter where I worked; office vs. at home, accounting vs. other cool stuff.  Those comparisons aren’t important.  They don’t matter because it’s almost insignificant in a grander scheme that I’ve worked out for myself.

That’s how you don’t suck.  That’s how you get awesome.

***

Anyway, I will be in Egypt for the entire month of August, so things will be on hiatus for a bit.  If anyone who’s a regular here will be in Egypt (Cairo, Dahab, Alexandria) during August hit me up with an email (lastyearsfile@gmail.com).  Let’s grab a drink and smoke some shisha.

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Awesome book.  Some stretches can be really difficult to get through.  Melville takes a lot of time describing the minutia of whaling and Moby Dick enters the story very late in the book.  But the frustration and anticipation make the ending that much better, and when you look back on the novel you can appreciate why Melville did this.

Captain Ahab had the best quotes by far – “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” or “I am madness, maddened!  Badass.

The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss

Good book.  Really practical.  I’m a huge fan of Tim’s blog, I’d recommend checking it out.

Ignore Everybody and 39 other keys to creativity – Hugh McLeod

This is a really quick read, similar to Tribes.  I don’t have much to say about it.  Yeah, it was good and the advice made sense.  Was it awesome? Meh, not really I guess.  It only reaffirmed the way I felt about certain things.  I’m happy it read it though.

Seneca: Letters from a stoic – Seneca

I’ve read a few books on philosophy.  Most of them aren’t the least bit accessible to the average guy – the person they’re supposed to be helping in the first place (i.e. Carl Jung).  Others are so hopelessly stupid that they make you want to punch yourself in the face – ahem The Secret.  Stoic philosophy isn’t like that.  It’s practical advice for everyday problems, designed for the average person.

My favorite quotes, “A person going out into the sun, whether or not this is what he is going out for, will acquire a tan.” and “It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of things that do come his way.”  Good stuff.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig

I tried really hard to like this book.  It didn’t work.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

Great book.  Well laid out, really interesting and written in such a way that you don’t get overwhelmed when the author introduces complicated topics.

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

Liked this the best out of his three books.

Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Caroll

Really liked these a lot.  It was nice to read after a heavy book like Moby Dick.

Last Wednesday I went out for lunch with a few people from the new firm.  It was good.  The partner I’ll be reporting to is great and the other staff who came with were really easy going.  That said, it’s going to be difficult getting accustomed to a new culture.

I’m the kind of person that likes to strategize and plan things to the last detail.  For some reason I hadn’t even thought about office culture until that lunch.  More importantly, its impact on how I’ll get my work done.

Everyone at the table was making inside jokes.  One manager started ripping on a partner’s golf game.  Our waiter recited a senior’s drink order from memory.  The HR manager made a curb reference that almost everyone got.  Lots of small things like that, which can seem trivial at first, but make up that esoteric quality of an office. At my old office I could blast tribe called quest (on actual speakers, not headphones), while speaking to a CFO (literally on the phone, I was allowed to call most clients) about different accounting treatments (my partner let me do the research then relay it).  That’s a very distinct culture.  And I know the new firm will have a a very distinct one too.

After realizing this, lunch become painful.  I was too busy knitting together the jokes, humor, body language and mannerisms of my lunch mates with the rigid hierarchies of an office.  I was trying to visualize an office culture where I could be myself, without seeming “different.”

I know this sounds intense.  And I’m a lot cooler with everything now.  It’s just good to consider these things.  How well you fit in at your job directly translates into how much you like it.

It sucks, because audits are designed in such a way, that whenever there’s a conflict one person is always right and the other always wrong.  There is no collective bargaining.  On most audits, when problems come up, it’s rare that you’ll reach a solution that’s agreeable to everyone.  And it’s unfortunate, because this can stall your file, eat up time and push you over budget.  Unlike CRA workers, who I can yell at and hang up on without too much consequence, audit clients need to be coddled.

I thought about it for a while – how to deal with difficult clients.  I needed some type of solution other than hating people because it’s way too exhausting.  With some client’s this can be very hard.  And if I’ve had a few cups of coffee, on a particularly difficult day, it takes a lot of effort not to blow up on certain bookkeepers, who manage to mess up opening retained earnings for the 4th year in a row.

It’s hard.  I asked one of my partners what to do.  He told me it was more about feelings than finding a solution.  “They’re just pissed because they know they’re wrong and they don’t want to be.  Or worse, they don’t understand what you’re saying and they feel stupid.”  “Well that’s not my fault.”  “I know, but if you throw that in their face, it’s going to make the situation worse.  Let them cool off a bit.  Talk to them for a while.  Find out why they’re really mad.  Get to know these people.  Ask how their day is going.  See what they did on the weekend.  That sort of stuff.  It’ll humanize the process a bit.”

That really helps.  Let people vent.  If someone blows up at you, it may not be your fault.  Ask them about it.  They’ll appreciate the opportunity to get those problems off their chest.  Find out what their favorite food is.  And when you have a meeting, suggest a restaurant that serves it.  Little things like that help a lot.

So that’s the challenge.  Getting to know who you’re dealing with.  Not telling them why you’re right.  But showing some empathy.

Networking is hard.  You have to approach a bunch of people you don’t know, in a setting your unfamiliar with for the purpose of mutual exploitation.  At least that’s how it felt at most university info sessions.

I was volunteering at a conference all week.  The people who made the most contacts weren’t the ones who were actively “networking.”  They were the ones who were genuinely interested in what other people were saying.  They made people feel important because they engaged them.  And through using this approach they created a magnetism that encouraged people to want to work with them.

They made networking look easy.  Instead of feeling intimidated because they didn’t know anyone, they got excited about how much they could learn from a group of really interesting people.  It didn’t matter where they were.  And when a contact was made or an idea hashed together it felt natural.  Being a part of that felt much better than the employer info sessions during 4th year.

It’s really difficult to find the time to eat healthy and stay active during busy season, especially if you work at a big 4 firm.  Last year I dropped close to 6 pounds just from stress.  I decided things would be different this year.  I made a conscious effort to actually gain muscle; actually to get as jacked as possible while working ridiculous hours.  It worked pretty well.  I put on 10 pounds of muscle in a month and upped my weight in every exercise.  Most notably were my deadlifts.  They jumped from 225 to 315.  Here’s how it’s done.

First, you need to change two paradigms.  One, when it comes to exercising, think of training specific lifts instead of training muscle groups.  I know lots of people who do 3 exercises per muscle and hit the same muscle group once a week.  It’s far more effective to perform exercises that train multiple muscle groups at once (compound exercises) that can be done 3 times a week.  It makes your workouts far more efficient.  To reiterate it’s more effective to train a muscle 3 times a week verses 3 times a workout.

Second, doing cardio is not the best way to lose weight/get cut.  This is difficult for most people to comprehend.  It’s actually easier to lose weight through lifting heavy and eating better.  This goes for girls too.  You will not look like this if you do the exercises I mentioned above.  Girls don’t have enough testosterone.

When it comes to eating it’s best to think of the things you can eat versus what you can’t.  Think of it this way, you can eat as much protein and vegetables as you want.  If you have a protein and vegetable with every meal you’re doing pretty good.  Then in between meals you can snack on fruits, nuts and dairy products like cottage cheese.  A sample day could look something like this.

Breakfast: 5 egg omelette with pancetta

Snack 1: 2 handfulls of almonds

Lunch: 2 salmon fillets and some salad

Snack 2: strawberries and blue berries

Dinner: Chicken breast and butternut squash

Keep in mind I’m not a personal trainer.  I casually read websites like EliteFTS, T-Muscle and straight to the bar.  I also watch Ronnie Coleman videos – more for comedic reasons than anything else (YEAH BUDYYY!!!).  But I have followed this plan and I have tracked my progress in excel for the past month and a half.  Here are my gains.

Squats: 225 – 255

Deadlifts: 225 – 325

Bench press: 225 – 235 (I tore a muscle because my form was lacking)

Press: 95 – 135

Snatch: 135 – 155

Weight: 170 – 180

I do two different workouts that alternate every other day.  On average they take 90min.  This includes a 5min warm-up and 10 min cool down of light cardio and stretching.  I usually throw in dips, chin ups, pull ups and push ups randomly too.  I’m a huge fan of the workouts because they’re so simple.  Don’t let that fool you though.  These workouts are hard.

Workout 1: Squats, Press, Deadlifts (5 sets of 5 reps)

Workout 2: Squats, Bench press, Snatches (5 sets of 5 reps)

If anyone is thinking of doing something like this I highly recommend reading starting strength.  It explains how to do each of the above exercises properly.

Have fun!

I haven’t posted in a while.  And this is the reason.  I resigned.

The right way to resign is with class.  You only have to give two weeks notice, but three definitely doesn’t hurt.  You could resign during busy season, but it wouldn’t kill you to wait until after April 30th.  You could resign when the majority of the partners are on vacation, but it shows more respect if you do it in person.  It’s best to leave on a high note.

It can be tempting to go out in a blaze of glory or pepper your actions with a passive aggressive tone, especially if you don’t like the people you work with.  But it’s a bad idea.  You can’t win.  If you’re going this route, you’d have to ensure your actions could never come back to bite you in the ass, which is impossible.

So the right way to resign is with class, the best way to resign is through foresight and planning.  Here’s how this went down and how I will ultimately end up in Egypt for a month this August.

I knew it was important to get at least a year’s worth of experience under my belt after I was fired.  Getting fired drop kicked my credibility in the face and sacked my confidence in the balls.  Working at a firm for at least a year would go a long way in getting me back on track.  At that point I was ready to take anything.  Starting last February I knew that I’d be looking for a job at the end of busy season this year.  That’s when I started planning.  I planned for my resignation a year in advance.  I made a timeline with milestones and I made sure I hit every one.  I had a macro plan and it looked something like this.

February (start calling recruiters/update resume)

• February 24^th had a meeting with a recruiter and discussed my plan.  I wanted to quit in June and start working at a new firm in Sept.  This would give me the entire summer off.

March/April (Go through list of firms with recruiter/decide on trip in August)

May (interviews/decide on trip/buy tickets)

• May 13^th and 21^st – first and second interview with new firm
• Decide on Egypt and begin talking with my friend’s sister who’s a travel agent
• May 30^th tickets bought.

June (decision/resign)

• June 3^rd I signed the work agreement.
• June 5^th I resigned.

Now I’m working out the details.

When you resign it’s important to read the entire policies and procedures manual – especially reimbursements for the CKE, SOA, UFE, prep courses and medical expenses.  It’s very common for firms to require employees to pay these amounts back within a year of getting them reimbursed.

And this is why my last day is Saturday July 4th instead of Friday July 3rd.  If I picked Friday I’d owe the firm $1,400 on top of my $1,300 UFE fee.  That’s almost $3,000 I’d have to pay back.  It’s a good idea to ask your new employer to cover these costs.  They might not, but it’s not an unreasonable request.

Vacation days are another important issue.  Some firms give you vacation straight up.  Others accrue it over the course of the year.  If you’re planning to resign in June and took 2 weeks vacation in May, you would owe the firm money if they accrued vacation.  That would suck.  My firm accrues vacation so as at June 30th I will have accrued half of my vacation days or 1 week.  This allows me to take next week off and volunteer at the IdeaCity conference.  Where I plan to talk to this guy about giant squids for a prolonged period of time.

After you’ve thoroughly combed through all of the firms policies and procedures you’ll have to focus on people.  Understand who you’re dealing with.  For example, I work with 4 partners, 2 secretaries, 1 office manager and 12 staff accountants.  We have 2 lead partners and 2 semi-retired partners.  The secretaries and office managers control the flow of information in the office and everyone else works on files.

I told all the staff accountants 2 weeks in advance of my formal notice that I was quitting.  I did it because everyone I work with is awesome and I wanted their input.  I also wanted them to hear it from me, which lessens the impact of the formal email that’s ultimately circulated when someone resigns.

Then I told the partners.  I told the head partner first.  Don’t mess this up.  Talk to the person you know you’re supposed to talk to.  Talking to a partner that’s retiring when you know you should be talking to the managing partner makes you look like a coward.

People respect it when you are forthright.  As much as it sucked, I walked into my managing partner’s office, told him that I had decided to resign and handed in my letter.  And I repeated this with each other partner.  Things can fall apart easily here, so be warned.  Your boss will want to know why you’ve decided to resign.  Give them reasons that they can’t compete with; otherwise it will turn into a really awkward bargaining session.  And be sure to say as little as possible.  Your partner will be surprised and even though they’ll be asking questions, treat them as rhetorical ones.

Once the partners knew, I told the secretaries and office managers.  They would have found out that day anyways since the partners sit closest to them.  If they didn’t hear it directly, they would’ve overheard it eventually.

This strategy has worked perfectly.  Even though I’m leaving at the end of this month work isn’t awkward.  I still joke around with everyone and I still high five my partners.  It’s the perfect scenario.  It just took a stupid amount of planning.  Now I have the entire month of July to look forward to where I’ll be taking a personal training course and generally doing nothing.  Then come August I ship off to Egypt where I’ll be partying/taking in the sites for a month.

Epic Win.

Why doesn’t anyone like auditing?  Yeah, I guess it sucks if you’re at a big firm and all you do is tie in schedules.  But that doesn’t mean it’s awful.  It means tieing in schedules sucks.  It means that what you’re doing is particularly boring and your job has been segregated to a point that makes your 9-5 seem meaningless.  It’s just a matter of perspective.  Anything can be awful if you define it narrowly enough.

If you enjoy strategy on a very high level then auditing is awesome.  Yes, awesome.  I’m in the middle of auditing a public company for the past two years.

I’m dealing with the following people – my partner, the management of the public company, the buyers and the minions who work for the latter two.  While putting together an audit strategy for two years at once, I’m trying to appease all these people, sometimes set them against one another all while trying to meet my deadlines.

It’s intense and it requires a lot of foresight – which I don’t fully have – as well as the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances.  Here’s a good example.

As of yesterday we only had the financials.  We’ve been requesting source documents, bank statements, deposit books, invoices, a/p listings – everything you need to do an audit – for the past month.  Not surprisingly the buyers contacted us wondering how the audit was going.  We told them.  It wasn’t.  We didn’t have anything.  Not thinking, I told them what we needed.  Now this had the effect of throwing the bookkeeper under the bus, because it looked like she’d been sitting on her hands doing nothing for the past month.

So yesterday went like this.

• Partner mad that the audit hasn’t started – gives me a “get er’ done” look
• Bookkeeper calls pissed off that I’ve unknowingly thrown her under the bus
• One of the buyer’s minions calls confirming why I need all of the info I requested even though we have draft financials.  I try very hard not to call her retarded and politely explain that I need the information to audit the draft financials so we can remove the draft watermark.

This is the good stuff.  This is when you get to strategize and solve problems.

• I let the bookkeeper vent for half an hour.  By the end we’re joking and she’s offering to take me out to lunch.  Solid.
• She also agrees to bring in all the source documents.  Cash money.
• Buyers are satisfied that we have the info and can now begin.  *air five unsuspecting co-worker*
• With all the info I draft an audit plan and tell my partner that we’ll do the audit meeting the following afternoon (today).
• That afternoon I send out all my confirmations in one email and set deadlines for when we need them back.

This is good stuff.  This isn’t boring.  Obviously I’m going to tie in schedules and do other things that aren’t as exciting.  But those are just very small aspects of a much more elaborate process.

I know a lot of people who hate audit.  I think I’m happy where I am.

Edit:

Krupo – The new Metric CD is sick.  I’ve been listening to it on my ipod all week.  Do you listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s?  I think you might like them.

Kel – The CPA progress chart is a really cool idea.  Good luck with the studying.

Francine – If you stop by and still read my ramblings, thanks for the phone call the other day.  Hopefully that position got filled.  “Button down mafia” is still my favorite phrase of 09.

The Evolution of Cooperation – Robert Axelrod

I first learned about this book when I read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.  Axelrod created a computer simulated competition to see if cooperation could evolve out of largely “selfish” entries.  Long story short – it can.  It’s a good book, but I’m not an evolutionary biologist so I found it hard to get into.  Some of the conclusions at the end are pretty cool.  Good food for thought.

Oh the places you’ll go/One fish two fish red fish blue fish – Dr. Zeuss

Dr. Zeuss is awesome.  I never grew up with it and I feel like there’s a gaping whole in my childhood.  The illustrations are pretty good too.  One fish two fish red fish blue fish is also entertaining.

The Peloponnesian War book 3 – Thucydides

Honestly, too much stuff is happening.  I wish this book was compulsory reading in school.  If it was, I think I would’ve gotten more out of it than I am now.  There’s so much to keep track of.  Makes your head explode after a while.  It’s proving to be a very difficult read.

The Art of War – Sun Tzu

I’m pretty sure there’s an unwritten rule that The Art of War is compulsory reading for anyone with a “business job.”  The book is good.  Sometimes it’s a little vague and understanding what Sun Tzu was trying to say is often difficult.  In terms of strategy books, I think Robert Greene’s the 48 Law of Power is a little more accessible.

Tribes – Seth Godin

I just read this book in one sitting.  I bought it this afternoon around 2:00, came home and started reading at about 3:00 and finished it 5min ago.  I felt engaged the whole way though, like someone was talking to me. If you like Seth Godin’s stuff, Tribes is worth reading.  His TED presentation is good too.

The Art of Living – Epictetus (interpreted by Sharon Lebell)

This book is an “interpretation.”  It sucks and I don’t recommend reading it.  It’s like reading the secret, but worse.

Anyone reading anything good at the moment?