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How to Sharpen Your Brain for Success at the Start of Your Accounting Career

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Your brain controls everything you do and are. Every time you enter numbers in your Excel spreadsheet, the motor section of your brain gives the command to your fingers to hit the keys. When you listen to your client talk, the language section of your brain processes the sounds into words. When you plan your day, your frontal cortex is front and center. Even when your heart flutters at a compliment you receive, it's your brain that pulls those heart strings.

When your brain works well, you have the potential to succeed. When your brain works poorly, so do you. For people who want to enjoy a highly successful career — what I call a rock star accounting career — it just makes sense to learn as much as possible about how to maximize the most important resource we possess: our own brains.

For young professionals at the beginning of their accounting careers, here are some key ideas about the brain and how to maximize performance.

The Malleable Brain

It's important to note that you can change your brain for the better and that your brain (as well as your intelligence and skills) is not preset with what you were born with (as half the population falsely believes). You have much more control over your brain than your brain would lead you to think!

Your Environment

Two things that shape your brain are your genetics and the environment, and brain researchers have come to learn that our environment plays a huge role in our brain development. By using the word environment, I mean it in the broadest sense, to include our surroundings at the office, in traffic, and at home; the people we spend time with; the foods we eat; the mental and physical activities we spend time doing, and the sleep we get.

The concept of brain plasticity is relatively new and means that your brain grows new cells, or learns, every single day until you die. You have the ability to learn new things, make memories, and get smarter (or dumber) your entire lifetime.

Design Your Own Brain

Within limits, you can pretty much design your own brain. You've heard of "You are what you eat. It's a more subtle realization that the activities you do in life, both exciting and boring, and the thoughts you think, both good and bad, are the inputs for how your brain is shaped.

The key is to spend time on what you want to learn about or get good at. Practice is the key to a fabulous brain and a rock star accounting career.

Some of the activities that grow healthy new brain cells include learning a foreign language, solving a challenging math problem, trying out a new piece of software, exercising, practicing a new skill at work, and traveling.

Correspondingly, there are many things we can do to damage or kill brain cells, including excessive stress, alcohol and drugs, not enough sleep, staying isolated and not socializing with others, and lack of mental challenges.

Developing a brain for a rock star accounting career requires that you design your life around the activities and environment that support new brain growth. This is especially significant through age 25 while your brain is still rapidly growing, but is important throughout your entire life.

Still Growing Through Age 25

At age 25, our brains are fully formed, and brain growth is slowed to adult levels. Until age 25, our brains are missing a really big piece of frontal lobe, the last part of the brain to develop, which includes the function of foresight, or the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. Many of us have already chosen our career, perhaps married, and even had a child before we knew what would be hitting us!

If you are under 25, consider asking people older than you and that you respect for advice on how to plan the first few years of your career.

Strengths of a Young Brain

The young brain has many advantages to it compared to an older brain:

• Speed. A young brain is faster than an older brain with one exception: An older brain is able to perform faster on more complicated tasks.
• Memorization. A young brain can memorize facts, figures, and other items easier than an older brain.
• Technology. For this current generation, young professionals can outperform mature professionals on many computer tasks, simply because they grew up with them.

The 10,000-Hour Rule

Scientists have studied the top performers for decades now and one of the leading scientists, K. Anders Ericsson, has noted that people with rock star careers practice repeatedly. Malcolm Gladwell alluded to this in his book, Outliers, when he discussed the 10,000 hour rule. Generally, a person becomes an expert after practicing his craft or profession for 10,000 hours or about ten years.

Made, Not Born

Gladwell left out the good part, however: deliberate practice, which is the type of practice that makes the Tiger Woodses and Lance Armstrongs of the world. Ericsson noted that top experts also practice differently. They engage in a "constant innovation feedback loop that gives them a chance to change and improve their performance by revising and refining their practice methods.

For example, you can practice accounting for 20 years and without a feedback loop, you will be a fairly average accountant. You would probably do what you learned in school and that would be that.

But if you incorporated a feedback loop that consisted of reading and reviewing new accounting principles, staying current with the latest software, attending continuing education, and listening to other practitioners, then you would be honing your accounting skills for the better.

Deliberate Practice

As you perform your accounting tasks, your brain grows smarter and stronger in that specific accounting skill. Your knowledge becomes broader and deeper, you become faster with each performance, and you learn from every mistake and try very hard not to repeat mistakes. This deliberate practice is what separates the mediocre from the excellent.

Your Future Is Now

What's exciting about being young is you can pretty much design your own brain, with limits of course, but probably fewer limits than you think. Your brain is shaped by what you spend your time and energy on. When you can approach your tasks with as much curiosity and open-mindedness as possible, you will be able to soak in new knowledge that will make you better and better at what you do.

Before you know it, you'll have the brain of an accounting rock star.

Also, avoid getting into a rut. See: Keeping Your Job Fresh.

Sandi Smith, CPA, coaches CPAs and other accounting professionals to succeed in business. She is a frequent contributor to Intuit ProConnection. Her web site is www.BrainWaysTraining.com.

Last Updated: 08/13/2009