Busy, busy auditors. What are they doing?

“It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” -Henry David Thoreau

What the fuck are you doing with your life? Why are you so stressed about financial statements and accounting work-papers?

Let Your Ideal Self Go

“To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.” -Sven Goren Eriksson

“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” -Alan Watts

Envision the man you want to be. Seriously though. Envision the details. What does he do for a living. What does he value. What are his hobbies. How does he treat himself, his friends and his family?
Now get rid of this guy. He is an ideal and he is making you miserable. You're not him, and even if you actually achieve being him, you will adjust your ideal such that your work is never done. You are setting yourself up for disappointment, and worse, this ideal self is skewing your perception of your true self. This ideal is causing your super-ego to constantly give you feedback on what you 'should' be doing. Don't 'should on yourself'. It sucks, and it makes you miserable. Learn about who you actually are, not who you think you should be.

Be nice to you, and let your ideal you go.  Improve yourself, and set goals, but not with the intention of becoming perfect or achieving anything in particular. Do things because they make you happy. Do things because you want to be better tomorrow than you are today, not because you are chasing an unrealistic expectation  Be nice to you. “You, yourself, as much as anybody else in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” -Buddha

Accountants are Drones

Don't be a drone. I have to work with these people every day. They tend to fall into one of three categories:

1. Complete drones. They never thought about their lives or what they wanted to do. They are 'Milton' from the classic movie Office Space. These kids drink most of the corporate Kool-Aid because they don't understand life well enough to know that business is business.

2. "9 to 5ers". These are the majority of the people I work with. They have no aspirations to be partner or be a part of the C-suite in industry, nor are they willing to work the hours required to earn those roles. These staff and senior auditors are simply paying their "Big4 dues" so they can land that nice six figure private staff accountant job, working 40 hours a week.  Either that, or they are looking to find a nice banker, lawyer, or doctor to settle down with. Auditing really expands your network of potential spouses currently employed in the financial services industry. Mostly these people are sacrificing their happiness for a comfortable life from 5 to 9.

3. Smart kids. These are the future partners of the firm, or the future CFOs. They are either spending their weekends contemplating how to get requisitioned on the most prestigious clients at the firm, or taking MBA classes, or studying for additional certifications. They are active in the labor market, interviewing and keeping in touch with recruiters to get a feel for the real market value of their services. They understand the nature of the firm. The firm uses you, and you use the firm. Its just business. They come off as having drank the Kool-aid, but really they tossed it on the ground when no one was looking. Or they slipped it to some drone.

Never Forget.. Busy Season

People forget so quickly. The easy hours, low stress, and free happy hours help.

Busy Season ends, and you spend the weekend enjoying copious libations and celebrating with the team. Spend another night getting shitfaced with real friends. You get to do nothing at work for a few days, and take some hour-long lunches away from the desk. The relative bliss that is a normal work day makes you start to forget about all the bullshit. You're just so happy to not be at work until 2am, and dare I say, a little proud of yourself for finishing the project?  Its actually a great feeling, though its akin to applying an ice-pack to your bruised genitals.

Eventually, everyone gets back to being a zombie, hating their life from 9-6, then doing something to help assuage the misery in the remaining 5 waking hours.

Its not uncommon for people who go though drastic life changes and really traumatic experiences to actually value the experience, even though life was terrible at the time. These experiences wake you up.

 Don't forget that you hate your life 8 months a year. Do something you love. Do something where you make a difference, and add value to the world. Challenge yourself. Change your path.

Money Psycology

Financial services employees get involuntarily imbued with the money culture.

A world which revolves around money changes the way people think, and in turn the way people act and relate to each other. Ultimately this way of thinking and acting is institutionalized in the corporate cultures of financial services firms.

Greed makes people think differently about life, risk, potential jobs, potential spouses, potential friends and potential activities. The purpose of life is not to amass the largest net worth.

Money is a score card, but only for people who play the money game. Those people are usually miserable.

Do what you love and fuck the rest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/health/psychology/21doug.html?_r=0

Sunk Costs

There are no opportunity costs in life, only sunk costs.

The opportunity cost of each moment of your life is infinite. You could win the lottery, you could get hit by a bus.  Opportunity cost is not a useful tool for life decisions.

Each moment of your life is a sunk cost. There is no way to recover your time. If you are rational, you ought not to let your past dictate your future.  It happened, its over and you can't re-do it.   Your past is a collection of sunk costs, and, as Led Zeppelin so aptly put it, "there's still time to change the road you're on."

I see this shit everyday. Kids think they're committed to the accounting career path, even though they don't enjoy it. They can't possible forgo the opportunity to ride out the guaranteed stability of the accounting career path.  You'll never succeed if you don't love what you do. Don't be a middle of the pack paper-pusher. Take a chance, do what you love, be successful.

The decision of 19-year-old you, to get a degree in whatever, should not dictate the remaining 60 years of your life.  It happened, its a sunk cost. The rational question is, how do you want to spend your days going forward?

Glorified Secretaries

Auditors are 'glorified secretaries'

Really, auditors manage the details of the audit engagement. Auditors are generalists. They know a little bit about a lot of things. Jack of all trades, master of none.

The client has a material position in a complicated structured fixed income product? Lets send it to our experts and see what they think.  Oh, they have over-the-counter derivatives?.. Send them off to the experts. The client has complicated and customized IT systems? Call in the IT risk consultants.

Auditors work at such a high level, they really don't learn very much of value.



"Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live."- Henry David Thoreau

I Hate Auditing

I hate auditing because:

It is intellectually stifling
There is no synthesis of information
There is no payoff for being good at it. Seniority trumps meritocracy in public accounting
It is not difficult or challenging
It adds little, if any, value to clients or society
The nature of the work is repetitive and tedious

The logistics of the job are terrible. Staff sit in where they can in conference rooms, seniors 'borrow' whatever desks are available, managers share offices. Ridiculous.