Tag: professional-development

When Everything is a Priority

In a sea of “tell me about yourself,” someone asked an interesting question at an interview the other day.

The hiring manager asked me how I prioritize when everything is a priority. In this era of doing more with less and fast-moving environments, it is a fair question, and it started a meaningful conversation about how we work. It’s a question most people answer with instinct. There’s a better way.

When prioritizing, I use three pillars: risk, visibility, and materiality.

Risk.

In accounting, there are areas of the financials that have a higher propensity to cause harm if things are missed or not kept under control. Revenue recognition and accruals at reporting period ends are common examples. These areas tend to be the focus of compliance efforts. A useful signal: if an area comes up time and time again during audits, it is probably high risk. The question to ask: what happens if I get this wrong? If the answer scares you, that’s where you start.

Visibility.

Leadership will always have one or two KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they track closely while monitoring growth or the lack of it. Maybe it is a metric that once caused a major issue in a senior leader’s career, and they’ve learned to watch it closely ever since. You’ll know what these are quickly. They will be the first or second thing asked about during review meetings. It keeps you from getting caught off guard. When leadership asks, and they will, you need to have the answer. The people who advance prioritize based on what leadership is actually measuring.

Materiality.

Materiality is the accounting concept that only information significant enough to influence stakeholder decisions needs to be highlighted in financial reports. Most companies set a quantitative materiality threshold, a minimum dollar amount that triggers further review or action. If an issue falls below that threshold, it won’t necessarily be ignored, but it won’t be prioritized either. In accounting terms, “it is not material.” This is the pillar that gives you permission to say: this can wait. Most people never give themselves that permission.

These three pillars often overlap. When something is risky, visible, and material, that is where you focus first. No debate needed.

But here is what I find interesting: these are accounting concepts, but the logic behind them applies far beyond accounting.

When choosing what to prioritize in any context, ask yourself: What is the risk of not doing this? Do the people who matter, your team, your boss, your family, consider this important? And will this decision meaningfully change the outcome, or is it noise?

Those three questions can cut through most of the paralysis that comes with competing priorities. Not everything that feels urgent is risky. Not everything that is visible is material. And not everything that is material is visible. Knowing the difference is where good prioritization starts. And in a sea where everything feels urgent, that might be the only thing that keeps you afloat.

Know Your Numbers

Graduation season. Commencement speakers across the country are talking about AI, and how it will change everything. Graduating classes are booing them. They just spent four years and a small fortune preparing for careers they’re now being told might not exist.

I won’t pretend to know what AI will or won’t do to the professional lives of new grads, but I do know what determines whether people make good career decisions or bad ones.

It is not just talent, or timing, or connections. It is whether they are acting from confidence or from fear. And that almost always comes down to money.

At some point, most people will be in a job they hate. And although you can always change jobs, the process can be lengthy and difficult. In the current environment, it might feel downright impossible.

You never want to stay at a job that is affecting your mental or physical health just because rent is due on the first. You don’t want to be pushed into actions that could hurt your professional reputation for years just because you don’t have a single month of savings.

When I talk about a safety net, I don’t mean millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you understand your numbers and know your burn rate, how much you absolutely need to survive for a period of time, you can act.

Early in my career, I found myself at a job that was toxic. I was not valued and had spent years waiting for a promotion that never came. Worse, the job had started making me question my own worth. A voice in my head started whispering that maybe I wasn’t good enough for that promotion.

I had to leave.

I started looking for another job, but I felt that the toxicity and the long hours were not letting me perform my best at interviews. I needed to leave and cleanse myself of that place. I would not advise this as a first choice, but it was how I felt at the time.

I looked at my numbers and decided that I needed $5,000. This was over 15 years ago. Things were cheaper, and I had a lot fewer bills to pay, but that and some part-time temp work should be enough to get me through six months.

From that point, my focus was on saving that $5,000. Once I had it in the bank, I quit. And things worked out. When I look back, I always see this as the real beginning of my accounting career. A small amount of money and confidence in my numbers made all the difference.

But it is not just about escaping from a bad situation.

A friend recently reached out to me, completely bummed out. A company had contacted him with his dream job. The job he wanted since he was a kid. He loved the company, the mission, the team. The role was a perfect next step and promised a lot of upside. But it came with a 30% pay cut. The company was a startup that couldn’t match his Fortune 10 salary. He was offered equity, but promises of future riches do not pay the bills today.

He looked at his budget and couldn’t figure out how to survive with 30% less. With a heavy heart, he turned it down.

I hope this experience makes my friend take a hard look at his numbers.

Most people don’t think about money as a career tool until the moment they need it to be one. A new job that requires a move. A new opportunity that requires a pay cut. The chance to pursue a dream. All of those require a reserve of money and the clarity to use it.

It all comes down to money. Having cash in the bank gives you freedom. And most importantly, it allows you to act from a place of confidence, not a place of fear.

Ironically, even if you decide to stay at your job, knowing that you could leave changes everything. You speak up more. You walk with more confidence. You hold your convictions more firmly. And that makes you a better leader and a better employee, the kind that good organizations notice and reward.

To new graduates, I still don’t know what AI will do to your careers. But I do know this: learn your numbers. Know what you need. Build a cushion. Everything else gets easier from there.

The Questions That Were Never Asked

I could tell something was wrong the moment my friend picked up the phone. She had just spent a “ton of money” paying someone to rewrite her LinkedIn profile and they had done a terrible job. A bad, no good, horrible job whose only use would be as kindling for a fire (I’m paraphrasing here).

I was surprised since she had used a professional. Let me take a look, I said. Maybe I could help.

The package included a resume, executive bio, and a LinkedIn profile with instructions about how to populate the site. I read it all and thought… it was perfectly okay. It was professional and well written, easy to read, full of the buzzy keywords. I started to wonder what the real problem was.

I decided it was an issue of misaligned goals. I asked my friend some questions to find out.

Questions like: What is the main purpose of this profile? What do you want people to take away when looking at it? What kind of tone do you want to convey? Who is your main audience? Besides company names and titles, what do you want to communicate about your career?

She was surprised by the questions because her LinkedIn profile writer never asked them. But more importantly, she herself had not thought about them. She asked for a couple of days to sit with it.

Once she came back with answers, I had the clarity I needed to do a rewrite. I sent it to her a few days later, and she loved it. This was finally what she wanted. What she wanted all along.

She thanked me for all my hard work. What she didn’t know was how little work I had done. I pretty much changed the point of view and did some surgical rewrites, but overall, the foundation was the same package she had paid for.

This made me think about how many projects and pieces of work get tossed every day because we don’t ask simple questions about the end goal at the beginning. About how we discard good work just because it doesn’t match the fuzzy picture we have in our minds.

The professional who helped my friend never asked about the ultimate goal. She assumed it was the same as everyone’s: maximize recruiter engagement. And she delivered exactly that. A well-put-together yet generic result.

My friend failed to see the potential in what she already had. A few strategic questions and a few precise rewrites were all it took to get to the desired outcome.

Good work gets thrown away every day. Not because it’s wrong, but because nobody asks what “right” is supposed to look like.

I’ve Seen Stuff

And just like that, we are in 2026.

After grad school I started this blog to organize my thoughts and share them with the world. I’ve always had so much in my head that it just made sense.

But then life got busy. I started my career, sometimes working two jobs. Suddenly, there were fewer and fewer hours in the day, so I decided to pause writing. The entire time, I was planning to come back once things calmed down. Well, it is now 2026, 14 years since my last post.

So what have I been doing for 14 years? I got my CPA and built a career in corporate accounting. I’ve worked inside companies whose names you’d recognize, alongside people whose personalities matched the size of the brands. I survived a global pandemic. And recently, I spent a year in a CFO Executive program at Columbia that changed my perspective on a lot of things.

As I told someone at a job interview the other day, “I’ve seen stuff.”

My new goal is to post consistently for the next year. Start with a goal, build a habit.

Still, as I revisit my old posts, I realize that my thoughts have not changed much. I have more nuanced opinions on a couple of things, but overall, I still stand by everything I wrote back in the day.

I don’t know if that is good or bad. On one side, it shows conviction and consistency. On the other, it might show inflexibility. After everything I’ve done, you would think my thinking would have evolved more. Adam Grant, author of Think Again and a big proponent of rethinking your assumptions, would probably disapprove. But I’d rather be honest about where I stand than pretend 14 years turned me into a different person.

Let’s restart this journey and see where it takes us.