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yourself.

Understanding business comes naturally to many people, even if most of them have brainwashed themselves into thinking that they "can't get all that stuff." Your job will be to help them "get it." That means studying bookkeeping (the mechanical aspect of accounting), economics, finance, even law as it pertains to business. When I was in college studying accounting, my fellow accounting students typically complained that we had it much harder than anyone else in the College of Business, because we had to become experts in everybody else's field, while they only had to worry about one course of study.

The usual gripe (and it was almost true) was that we had to take more and harder economics courses than the economics majors. We had the sympathy of students in Navy ROTC, who, regardless of their major, had to take non-credit marine engineering courses which caused great fear and trepidation among even engineering students. The number and difficulty of the courses, however, were not the chief problem. I quickly discovered that, in the real world, what we learned in economics did not bear a very close resemblance to what really went on, or explain how the economy really works. The problem is that virtually all of economics today is Keynesian, and Keynes (despite the fact that he wrote a book in 1936 on "employment, interest, and money") didn't understand money, credit, banking, or finance. We would have done much better to use the economics textbooks written by Dr. Harold Moulton in the 1930s, which described reality, than modern texts dictated by unrealistic Keynesian assumptions.

This brings us to the most important thing in becoming an accountant, or anything else, for that matter. The most important thing you can learn in school is that you don't know one blessed thing about being an accountant just because you have a diploma. The only thing you can really learn in school is how to learn. If you go into your first entry-level job in accounting thinking that you actually know accounting, you will be useless to the company, and extremely frustrated. At best, what you learned is the language of accounting, some theory of which you probably don't grasp the implications, and a willingness to listen to and learn from people who have actually been doing accounting, and can show you how it's done. It's only after you've been "doing accounting" for a while that a light goes on, and you can call yourself an accountant.

Learn more about this author, Michael Greaney.
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