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What do I want to do with my life? Trying to give you a direct answer would be as futile as trying to describe the color green to a blind person. For, as foolish as this may sound, it is my aspiration to one day make my name in accounting, that most inscrutable, that most romantic of callings.
Accounting! The word carries so many meanings that I might as well tell you I want to be a Renaissance man, or a human being. Yes, I want to be an accountant. But an accountant of what? Of money? That's true in a sense, but in another sense, it's-
Well, I suppose it's true in the other sense too.
But think! That one day I might see my name up there on the Excel spreadsheet listing the titans of the profession, the all-time-great accountants. Frank Mendleton, John P. Mendleton, the woman-accountant Harriet Mendleton, George Mendleton, George H. Mendleton, John P. Mendleton II, and Chuck "Chuck Mendleton" Mendleton. And that's just the Mendletons.
People focus so much on classes in college, but that's not what it's all about. Sure, I've grown as a student. I've grown as a person, too. But more generally, I've grown as an accountant. In a profound sense, I have learned how to account. I could not ask for a better education.
It's what happens outside of class that counts. I can't tell you how many evenings my accounting friends and I have spent just getting high and pondering the big questions of accounting. How much money does this person have? What about this other person? Can we ever truly know how much a person is worth? Yes.
I wouldn't quite say I want to be an accountant per se. Call me an accountant-auteur. An accountant-artiste-auteur-baguette, if you will.
The essential nature of accounting is inherently indistinct. It is something philosophers have grappled with for centuries, and yet this hard-to-pin-down je ne sais quoi is precisely what forms accounting's mystique, its exotic allure. Being an accountant means endlessly questioning oneself. What am I? A personal accountant? A management accountant? Some combination of the two? These are the three options.
I think I always knew in the back of my mind that someday I wanted to account. I entered college on the pre-med track, but my heart was never really in it. Visions of the glamorous accounting life would flash before me and I would dismiss them as preposterous, a pipe dream. But the accounting itch refused to abate, and I can no longer ignore it. As the great Lewis Mendleton once said, "A dream deferred depreciates in value over time in an exponential manner."
And so it is with wide eyes that I embark on this momentous voyage out into uncertainty, into the great unknown void of variable transaction policies and ever-fluctuating interest rates, honored at the mere opportunity to air my voice in the age-old conversation that has taken place among accountants since the profession was begun by the venerable ancients, pioneers of the field.
I eschew the life of security that you covet. I recognize the risks, but I choose accounting because I prefer to burn brightly just once instead of flickering dimly on until death. And though the story of my life shall fade over the centuries, may posterity still remember me for my work, may they look back upon this time and proclaim for all to hear: "Here was a great accountant! Here was the voice of a generation!"
