I Love Numbers

I’ve always considered myself an intellectual.

Even as a kid, I preferred books, ideas, and adult conversations over tinkering with an erector set.  As I got older, I ignored engines, tools, or anything that required grease. If a machine broke, my thoughtful contribution was to make suggestions about who should fix it, other than me

In junior high school, I took a typing class.

At the time, typing was not considered an activity for future intellectuals. Typing was for future secretaries and clerks. While I was learning that my left index finger was responsible for the letter F, the smart kids were studying science, literature, and foreign languages.

Today, by contrast, if you can’t use a keyboard, you are essentially a Victorian.

In high school I enrolled in a bookkeeping class.  Again, this was a practical class, filled with students who did not plan to attend college.  The number of my “intellectual” friends in that class?  Zero.

Nobody bragged about being good at bookkeeping.  No one said, “My dream is to spend my life chasing receipts and reconciling checking accounts.  But I took the class for a practical reason. I wanted to keep track of my own money.

In my late twenties I started a business.  That’s when numbers became more than just a personal passion.  I learned that numbers have distinct personalities.

Revenue is optimistic.

Expenses are inventive.

Forecasts are fiction.

And taxes always seem to know exactly when you’re feeling financially comfortable.

Over the years, my love of numbers helped me buy properties, run businesses, publish books, and support causes I cared about.

Looking back, I realize, a typing class taught me how to communicate.

A bookkeeping class taught me not just how to survive, but to thrive.

And life taught me that the courses that might seem to be off your beaten path are often the most important in preparing you for your very best future.

But if someone had told the fumbling thirteen-year-old intellectual in that typing class filled with future secretaries and clerks that he would someday become a very successful CPA, he would have typed a brief, but thoughtful objection.

Very slowly.  And with many misspelled words.

Alan