The summer is a good time to catch up on added learning, some of it in the form of required CPE and others in the form of personal development courses, books, podcasts and firm retreats.
I know many colleagues who jump at every chance to learn something new, and others who do no more than take the minimum necessary to maintain their license. I regret the latter since I know they are selling themselves, their clients, their partners, and their staff short.
If I knew everything I would ever need to know, I would not need to spend any time learning anything else. I don’t, however, and that’s why I try to learn as many new things as possible.
An easy way to learn new things is to listen to podcasts in the background while you are doing work that doesn’t require intense concentration. Another way is what you are doing right now by looking at columns posted at
Another easy way is to read graphic books. I’ve read a bunch of them in the last year, and they only take about an hour. Some have been written on some very heavy topics. Stroll through the business section of your local bookstore or the graphic novel section of your public library and see what they have. I also take a lot of one-hour webinars. These are easy to bear, are focused, condense a lot of information into an hour, and I get CPE credit for it. Sometimes I log on to a webinar on a topic I know quite well to see if I could glean something from it. I usually do and that makes me more “expert” than if I passed it by. I subscribe to a lot of magazines and journals and try to go through them as they are received. If I don’t, then they wind up on a pile that I likely won’t get to, and someday it will get thrown away without any transfer of any of that knowledge to me.
I am fortunate — or maybe nutsy — that I do a lot of writing. This forces me to look for new ideas to write about. That is a great way to learn. I also have clients, as we all do, who are very smart. You need to always show them that you are ahead of the curve, and sharing what you learn provides that ammunition.
Our currency is what we know, along with our ability to use it to help our clients. The more we know, the richer we are, since the more we transfer value to our clients, the better our practices become. I know this for a fact. This works!
The opposite of continuous growth is stagnation, and that usually leads to atrophy and decline. Why set yourself up to fail? I know I don’t want that, so I keep growing, or at least trying to grow. It helps if you like learning new things, and I do.
So keep on learning, and keep on growing!
Do not hesitate to contact me at
Edward Mendlowitz, CPA, is partner at
