The fact is, if you talk to highly successful people in any field, from tennis to accounting, you will find substantially the same attitude: no special interest in second place. In fact, of all the attributes that characterize highly successful people in general and highly successful accountants in particular, none is more universal than the simple desire to succeed. As Richard S. Hickock, CPA, former Chairman of Main Hurdman (now Peat Marwick Main & Co.) likes to put it, "The one thing nearly all successful accountants have in common is that they are not satisfied with the success they currently enjoy."
It is not suggested that to be successful in accounting, the only thing you really need is a great desire to be successful—hardly. Accounting, after all, is a complex and demanding field and if you lack the intelligence, judgment, technical skills, and discipline this profession requires, you are not going to get very far, regardless of how ambitious you are.
On the other hand, what is lacking in most of the accountants is the desire to direct these technical skills to a predetermined goal. What is lacking is a true commitment to success.
By "commitment to success," this does not mean that you need to ignore everything else in your life. To the contrary, as Charles A. Garfield, a California psychologist who has studied hundreds of top performers in business and other fields, points out, "optimal performers" are not, as a rule, workaholics or the so-called type A behavior personality. They take vacations, they enjoy close family relationships, they know when to stop working, and they are good at managing their stress.
A "healthy" appetite for success (however you choose to define it) is needed as an important goal and a good portion of your life should be organized toward that goal.
SUCCESS PATTERNS IN ACCOUNTING
Over the past several years, there have been a number of studies on the traits that make people successful. Most people at the top of the accounting profession share these following traits:
- They view getting ahead as a goal unto itself
- They work very hard
- They are not afraid to put themselves on the line
- They have a great deal of intellectual curiosity
- They like what they do and are guided by "internal" goals of excellence
GETTING AHEAD AS A GOAL UNTO ITSELF
Norman E. Auerbach is a CPA and attorney who, for many years, was the chairman of Coopers & Lybrand. He began his professional accounting career in 1947 in the firm which eventually became Coopers & Lybrand—a firm then known as Lybrand, Ross Bros & Montgomery. Jack Victor is a CPA and partner in Peat Marwick Main & Co. and a past president of the National Association of Black Accountants. He began his career as a clerk typist and then joined the Marines so that he could take advantage of the GI bill and attend college at night.
Here we have two accountants with two entirely different career paths, yet sharing one thing in common: a driving desire to move up the success ladder.
In the early 1950s, while he was moving up the ranks at his firm, Auerbach went to school at night at St. John's University to earn a law degree and was admitted to bar in 1955. But, he never had a chance to practice law until he retired his chairmanship at Coopers & Lybrand, and accepted an offer to associate himself with a law firm.
Jack Victor, unlike Auerbach, worked for a number of different organizations after getting into accounting. His first accounting job was as a senior accounting clerk. He then became a state insurance examiner, spent some time with Arthur Young & Co, partnered his own firm for a while, and then went to work in New York City as Deputy Commissioner of Human Resources, before assuming his present affiliation.
The steady rise of these two men typifies a pattern you will find among most accountants who have achieved a high level of success.
BEING WILLING TO PUT YOURSELF ON THE LINE
The problem with making decisions, of course, is that every decision you make entails a certain amount of risk, and because so many decisions in accounting are directly related to the bottom line, the decisions take on all the more importance. Maybe this is why so many accountants shy away from the decision-making aspect of the profession.
What is lacking in many accountants is a quality that publisher Malcolm Forbes chooses to call "imagination." "With some notable exceptions," Forbes said, "accountants are too cost conscious and figure conscious to let their imagination go. Too often, they fail to recognize, or even care about, the significance of the numbers." Forbes goes on to cite as one of the major failings of accountants in general—the failure to give "life" to figures. "Accounting is such a tough discipline," he says, "that the characteristics required to do the basic work correctly often smother the other ingredients of success."
The basic operational functions of an accountant can often be so demanding that they could very well, as Forbes says, "smother other ingredients" of success, but, if you are going to rise above the norm, you cannot allow this to happen. At some point, you must look beyond the figures and focus your energy and attention on what lies beneath the figures.
ACCOMPLISHMENT FOR THE "ART" OF IT
It should come as no surprise to learn that the overwhelming majority of highly successful people truly love what they do. As Malcolm Forbes, who is probably the best example of a businessman who takes enormous pleasure in his work, likes to put it, "If you don't like what you're doing you'll never be successful. I don't think anybody does something really well unless they truly enjoy what they do."
What is true for businesspeople as a whole is, of course, true for accountants. But, more than simply loving what they do, successful accountants, as a group, see an element of challenge and romance in virtually everything they do, even the most routine tasks. Accounting offers the chance to become involved in more aspects of business than other professionals can be involved with: taxes, costs, budgets, and deal making.
Take a job as routine as checking bills to verify accuracy. If the only thing you're interested in is accuracy, it's drudgery. But if you're looking, with interest, at bills, receipts, freight vouchers—what you're getting is a story. Then, there's more romance. You can follow what's happening.
INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY
The one trait, above all others, that differentiates accountants at the top of the profession from the middle-of-the-road practitioners is inquisitiveness. Inquisitive people are people who come up with creative ideas. Therefore, when information is presented, an accountant that possesses this trait will not be prone to accept information without raising questions. And when they raise questions, there is an element of common sense that comes through in their assessment and evaluation.
CONCLUSION
The qualities mentioned above are hardly the only ones shared by successful accountants. Most successful accountants are positive thinkers. They rarely complain about their work or about the pressures they are under. Most of them have a healthy sense of humor: they take what they do seriously, but they can laugh at themselves, too. In short, while they may be single-minded about their careers, they are also well-rounded individuals who give the impression that they would be successful in any field.
There is one more quality that should be stressed; one that in some ways transcends everything else: the ability to keep their spirit up in the face of frustration, rejection, and outright failure. If there is anything you can say about very successful people as a group, it is that they all know what failure tastes like. Most successful people have been fired from at least one job, and can point to any number of times in their careers when nothing seemed to be going right for them. It is significant, too, that a substantial percentage of Americans who had become millionaires by age 35, had also gone bankrupt before they found the financial vehicle that brought them their success.
So how are these people different from most? Put simply, they see failure as an opportunity for learning.
