The Benefit of Hindsight

Today I was fondly reminiscing about my inaugural client assignment as a newly minted auditor. While it is a "fond" memory today, at the time I was living through it, I thought for sure my career was over just as soon as it had begun.

A notoriously hands-off manager had selected me to head the audit of a financial services subsidiary. Given the recent headlines about senators demanding explanations from bank executives as to how their complicated financial products work, it's incredulous to think that I could be expected to understand the inner workings of a securities broker-dealer given my lack of experience. My ignorance, combined with a willingness to learn, would not have been a problem had I had an experienced teammate to guide me through the audit. Unfortunately staffing constraints unexpectedly pulled the senior associate from the engagement, leaving me camped alone outside of New York City for a month with no one but my client's controller to talk to. It was an overwhelming experience, but one that taught me more about audit execution than any classroom instruction ever could. I reached out to anyone in the firm willing to give me some guidance on each issue I encountered.

After such a difficult first assignment, working on large public companies seemed a bit more predictable. But the initial challenge had whet my appetite for a new gauntlet. After a few years working on the same client engagement, I was suddenly reliving the same situation where I had started, this time working on clients in manufacturing, real estate, and construction. All of the entities under audit were new to my firm, and most of them were small organizations. So I was leading the exploration team into the uncharted territory of a brand new audit.

While my public accounting career has been far from easy, I wouldn't trade my experiences for anything. Many of my teammates along the way followed a much different career path within the same firm, commencing their first few years in the profession on the same client engagement, in a more predictable environment. So when they found themselves thrown onto a new private company engagement in a new industry, they had no idea where to start. Their territory had always been mapped out before them, and now they were being asked to chart new waters without knowing how to read a compass. Thanks to my early challenges, I had learned to navigate uncertainty and complexity, maximizing the resources available within the firm.

If you are ever tempted to feel sorry for yourself because you think your career path has been much more difficult than those of your colleagues, remember that in hindsight, every challenge you conquer propels you much farther on your journey to professional success than the smooth, predictable road your colleagues may be on.