Read The Book

Getting better in your skills and development doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, some of the biggest wins in my career have come from small but often overlooked efforts – just reading the book. The “book” is not a specific document, but rather it is relative to your own industry. It is a book, manual, or documentation that serves as a universal resource for an industry, prescribing what to do and how to do the work. For accounting professionals, this is most often the Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) from FASB, but it could also refer to SEC, PCAOB, or other sources. How many times have you read the actual documents from these sources for the areas you either work in or directly manage?

An example within my own development was on the topic of fair value accounting. Accountants typically get surface-level exposure to topics during their school and studying for the CPA exam, but these topics are often exponentially more complex in practice. Being knowledgeable in this area and becoming an authority meant digging into ASC 820, reading SEC guidance, and studying all the helpful guides that the big accounting firms publish on this topic.

“Read the book” can be universally applied across any industry. To equate it to software engineering, engineers interested in a topic should study the documentation. Auditors can read resources from the PCAOB or AICPA. The time spent on these activities will create a tangible ROI, but often we convince ourselves that we’re too busy stuck in the hamster wheel to do such studying. However, true ownership of a domain means understanding the “why” behind it, and “the book” is often one of the best places to start.

Despite habitually reading the book, there is still so much more I can learn – continuous learning is a commitment to going the extra mile. It’s a dedication to going deeper than the surface and accepting that getting better means spending significant time on the confusing, frustrating details in the fine print to work towards true subject matter expertise. Only after you crawl through that glass can you start to own it.