What to do the Rest of the Time (#300)

Since this is the 300th episode, and the AccountingTools podcast has been around for 15 years, I thought it might be fun to step away from the usual accounting topics and talk about – what to do the rest of the time. It’s pretty much my philosophy on how to use leisure time.

Now, accounting does not have the best reputation for being exciting. I know, we all realize that there’s nothing more interesting in the world, but everyone else thinks that accounting is a boring profession. By comparison, there are smoke jumpers – those are the folks who parachute out of planes and into forest fires. Strangely enough, the only smoke jumper I ever knew was also a smoker – but that’s not relevant.

What is relevant is what to do with the rest of your time to make life a bit more exciting. I approach the issue by first deciding how much time to put into it. On the high end, there’s professional work, which generally takes up about 2,000 hours per year. On the low end is the beginner, who might spend 10 hours a year on something. Between those two extremes are intermediates, which I figure takes around 50 hours per year, and advanced, which takes upwards of 200 hours per year, and expert-level, which takes anywhere from 500 to 2,000 hours per year.

My point in describing these categories is that each successive level requires multiples more time than the level before it. To be intermediate requires five times more effort than a beginner, and to be advanced requires four times more effort than an intermediate, and so on. So to become really good at something requires an increasingly large block of your time.

I’ve sometimes dabbled in the range of being an expert. For example, I used to be on a men’s volleyball team that trained five nights a week, and had a coach. We gradually improved from a BB ranking, which is recreational, to a AA ranking, which is pretty competitive against college teams. We were good. And when I mean good, in our standard lineup, I had a guy from the Jamaican national team on my left, and a Junior Olympian on my right. That was pretty awesome.

A major advantage of operating at this level is that it’s an across-the-board confidence builder. When you’re really good at something, the confidence crosses over into your professional life, so you get better at that, too.

So, am I saying that being a really good setter on a AA-level volleyball team made me better at accounting? Yes, I am. Therefore, lesson number one, get really good at something else, and it improves your attitude towards everything.

But, there are some problems with operating at an expert level. One issue is that it hogs all of your time, so if you choose to be an expert at something, then that’s it – you can pursue just that one activity outside of work. There’s no room for anything else.

Another problem with training at an expert level is that it can be a love/hate relationship. It takes up so much time that at some point, you might begin to question why you’re doing it at all. For example, the other activity that I used to pursue at an expert level was mountaineering. It was absolutely consuming, and I was really good at it. I ended up climbing well over 500 peaks, and most of them were at least 13,000 feet high. But by the time I got to the last one, which was the Grand Teton in Wyoming, all I could think of was how many more hours before I’d be back at the trailhead and could drive home. So in short, operating at an expert level can be a dicey proposition.

I think a better approach is to deliberately keep the hours lower and go for an advanced level of expertise. That way, you don’t get burned out anywhere near as fast, and you’re still much better than an intermediate. And also, by only putting in around 200 hours per year on each activity, you can engage in two or three activities. It makes for a more well-rounded lifestyle. Which is lesson number two.

For me, that means being advanced at things like skiing, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Really quite good at them, but with nothing like the level of expertise of someone who’s gone all in on just one of them.

That’s my general philosophy on what to do with the rest of the time. I’d like to finish with a few comments about just how spicy life can get when you’re doing sports at this level. Now, you’re probably not going to get killed playing volleyball, but you sure can in skiing or mountaineering.

As a prime example, I was solo climbing a peak in California, and the route just below the summit involved going up a chimney, where one side was open to the air. Not especially hard, but it was about forty feet high. Just below the top of the chimney, I got stuck.

My backpack was jammed between a couple of rocks. I was wriggling around trying to get the pack loose, when it suddenly got incredibly loud. I had no idea what was going on. And then a fighter jet went by about 50 feet away. The pilot was banking away just as the plane went by, so all I saw was the undercarriage of this jet right next to me. And if you’ve ever been to an air show when one of the jets buzzed the crowd, you know just how loud they can be. Now picture it 50 feet away. I was so startled that I let go. And fell about an inch, because the pack was still stuck. I eventually got unstuck and kept going. But can you imagine if my pack had not been stuck when that jet went by? I really don’t know if I’d have fallen back down that chimney.

Here’s another example. If you go to Aspen, Colorado, one of the prime attractions is the Maroon Bells. It’s a famous couple of peaks that are photographed by everyone. If you were to look to the left of those peaks, across the valley, there’s another peak, called Thunder Pyramid. Which is an awesome name. It doesn’t get climbed anywhere near as much, because it’s not quite as high as the Maroon Bells. And it’s also harder. I decided to do a solo ascent, and got to the top pretty quickly. Since there was still some time left in the day, I decided to keep going and climb an unnamed 13,000-foot peak that was a little further along the ridge. The only obstacle was a 20-foot cliff face partway along the ridge. I climbed it – and just as I reached the top of the cliff, the whole thing broke loose below me and rolled away.

I don’t think there’s any skill level that tells you when something like that’s going to happen. I remember sitting there at the edge of the cliff, maybe breathing a little more rapidly than usual – and then skipping the rest of the climb, turning around, and going back down.

And for a final escapade, I was backcountry skiing in the mountains near Steamboat just last winter, and was going through the trees in pretty deep powder. I came up to a series of drops over snow-covered boulders, and it looked a bit marginal, so I decided to skirt around the edge. I was still looking at the boulders over my shoulder as I skied down, and turned forward just in time to see the broken-off tree branch that was about to go through my neck. That, without a doubt is, the closest I’ve ever come to getting killed. If I’d turned around a second later, it would have been messy. As it was, I dropped down and slid under the branch.

So why do I bring this up? Because when you get to the end of your career, what are you going to remember? That great set of financial statements that you issued as a controller? Or maybe that road show where you raised a few million dollars? Probably not. It’s the other stuff. I remember things like the view from the summit of Denali, and a lunar eclipse from a dive boat off the coast of the Philippines. Now that’s worth remembering.