I am the kind of auditor who "even completely changed his profession".
From June 20 12 to June 20 15, I worked in PricewaterhouseCoopers Beijing Branch. This experience in Puhua has benefited me for life. As @Tracy Liu replied, there are not many "interesting people" in the firm, but there are many interesting things!
During my three years in Puhua, I have served China Unicom, China Mobile, China Petroleum, Sinopharm Holdings, Sunshine Real Estate, Tesla and other small customers, and participated in projects involving telecommunications, energy, medicine, real estate, automobile and other industries. During the three years, I worked as a certified public accountant in China, and at the same time I took an examination of a certified public accountant in Hong Kong (QP4 passed, FE was in the middle).
20 15 1 1 I officially resigned. In the next few months, I am working on a personal small project. I found a technical team, and I did all the other links by myself. Since they are all "making an App", they basically belong to the category of "even completely changing jobs".
However, I have a career change record.
I majored in bioengineering at Xi Jiaotong University. After graduation, he became a translator. At first, he accepted a low-paying job from a translation company. Later, he only worked for Bloomberg Businessweek and two famous business schools in China.
Although the translation work paid off handsomely (I don't know where it was higher than the auditor's salary), I decided to switch to finance later. First of all, translation has lost its challenge; On the other hand, I think it is necessary to change careers because of the nature of work. This job can't be scaled up, and the income will always stop at that stage.
Of course, when I do the audit in the future, in the off-season or holidays, I will still take the work assigned by my clients. Therefore, seniors and juniors did not take the initiative to travel, and basically devoted themselves to translation and learning.
I have been leaving Puhua for almost three months, and I have been firm in my choice. I accept my fate, running for this small project I want to do every day, constantly challenging my ability boundaries and breaking through my comfort zone.
When I said I accepted my fate, I actually knew that I had laid a good foundation in the financial and auditing industries when my "old age" approaching 30 and my daughter were just born, but I turned around and jumped into unknown waters. This is absolutely a farce in the eyes of others, but it is inevitable in the eyes of my wife and I.
As a member of a professional service firm and an auditor who evaluates and responds to risks every day, vocational training enables such people to instinctively collect more information, conduct more investigations and analysis, and tend to rationally evaluate opportunity costs and risks. However, my personality cannot be changed because of my professional experience. I believe that "smoothing your sleeves and doing it directly" is one of the most lacking qualities for people who love reading and thinking, so I want to break through myself. I have always thought that I should act according to this creed put forward by Gandhi:
Simply put, it is "belief is thought, thought is language, language is action, action is habit, habit is values, and values are destiny".
I believe in this simple concept and try to put it into practice. Especially my daughter was born in August 15. I can't imagine that when she is faced with the same ideal and realistic choice in the future, I can't tell her that I chose to give up because I was afraid of the risks brought by change, not to realize my belief in the right idea, nor can I shamelessly say to her, "Because your father can't do it, you must do it."
During the three months at P& nbsp;, I have experienced too many things. I really want to look back and think about it. The experiences of Puhua are like those of a previous life. Those cash flow statements, BS and P & nbsp;, big mergers, small mergers, adjustments and offsets, income tax, transfer pricing, GAAP differences between international standards and American GAAP, manuscripts and aura are all like being masked.
I know they are all there, imprinted in my mind, but there is always a vague feeling. Emotionally, I feel so vague.
Just like after the death of a loved one, all the bits and pieces of the past, sounds and smiles are vivid in my mind, but I always feel that they are gradually leaving us.
Looking back on Puhua's audit experience, I think that apart from the rapid accumulation of professional knowledge and experience, the greater impact is on my learning ability, my work habits and thinking.
It is precisely because the audit work is intensive and time-consuming, so I have to work hard to realize my personal planning outside of work and cultivate my interest in running and reading. This forced me to study GTD, time management and knowledge management thoroughly, and then formed my own theoretical system.
After three years of audit life, besides working overtime and staying up late like others, my Nike running has accumulated 2500 kilometers of running mileage. My time statistics App atimelogger has been running on my mobile phone for three years. Every time I take the CPA exam, I set the number of tomatoes I need to accumulate in each exam and break it down to the next day. My tomato clock focus time App has accumulated thousands of tomatoes.
The first thing I do every morning is to sort out the to-do list of the day with a pad. I focus on "important but not urgent things" and finish "unimportant but urgent things" As for "important and urgent" things, they are naturally the focus of work and do not need special sorting. Before going to bed at night, I will spend 5 minutes writing down the main schedule of the day in my diary.
I use Evernote to do all the knowledge management. In the past three years, I have compiled 2700 notes in my Evernote, except the knowledge base in the financial field, others are mainly about self-management and efficient learning. Of course, there are my annual plan, annual summary, reading notes and poems translated in my spare time since 2009. I have established a complete set of knowledge management methods. Recently, I gave a lecture to an organization with 100 people through the internet, and it received a good response.
It can be said that I was forced to carry out GTD, time management and knowledge management by these four high-intensity jobs. Everyone has dreams, and there are things that are written in New Year's resolutions and waiting to be realized. These things that are more inclined to "poetry and distance" need us to use rules to restrain ourselves and achieve greater freedom. If we simply rely on the "free soul", it is often the result of three days of fishing and two days of drying the net.
When I share the contents of time management and knowledge management with others, I always quote a sentence from Goethe to emphasize why I should "manage" myself:
It is precisely because of the experience of rapid intensive learning (including auditing and pre-translation) that my passion for learning this matter has been created. I am not a person who studies for the sake of learning. I firmly hate all rigid and formalistic education. I only love learning and knowledge itself, and I don't like studying hard.
Many people don't think that there is a problem with learning now, and many people think that the development of technologies such as mobile phones and WeChat has not threatened people's learning and growth, but my view is just the opposite. I belong to a few people who are addicted to this problem.
I've seen the data. At the end of 20 14, the average daily usage time of wechat was about 40 minutes, and the usage frequency reached more than 20 times. My observations are basically the same. Now time is fragmented and information is always overloaded, but the development of science and technology has not brought corresponding help to learning this matter.
The current situation is that human cognition can't keep up with the development of machine cognition, and it is increasingly difficult to cultivate human character and habits under the current background. It is much more difficult to form the habit of concentration and persistence than before! Technology will not help people find the meaning of life.
Therefore, I think that the new technology has not achieved particularly remarkable results in helping people "be better themselves". Few products focus on improving users' cognitive and learning abilities and helping people learn faster and better. On the contrary, it is a bit tragic, exhausting the little willpower and concentration of human beings. Everyone needs lifelong learning, and everyone is faced with the problem of learning. So I summed up my own practice and thought, and answered the questions about learning and self-management in Zhihu.
In my opinion, learning this difficult and meaningful thing can be done in a simple and interesting way. Through study and growth, we all want to be better people. I think what I want to do is to create products and solve the problems faced by lifelong learners in the fragmented era.
I can't avoid my love for the difficult problem "How can lifelong learners learn efficiently in the fragmented era", but adhering to the principle of "belief is thought, thought is language, language is action, action is habit, habit is values, and values are fate", I have no choice but to leave the financial field and register a bear company to do this.
In my opinion, this is a kind of destiny takes a hand. Bear company should make the best tools for learners, just as Apple does for creators.
Auditing itself is wonderful. There are many new people and things, studying all kinds of companies, dealing with all kinds of departments and people, and digging up every important problem in enterprise statements. Before I found my unavoidable mission, I loved my audit work very much and devoted most of my time and energy to it.
However, after the career change, the "outside world" is really more exciting. When I came out, there was really nothing but my product concept and stubborn belief of 1 year. I have no technical partner, no designer, and I have never even done BP.
But I must solve these problems one by one. In order to find a technical partner, I combed all possible channels, from friends' recommendation, BBS of Beijing universities, industry forums, entrepreneurial groups and forums, IT people and founders on Zhihu and other vertical websites, I combed them one by one, followed the progress with excel tables, met more than 20 potential partners, and finally found a very suitable partner. Most of these people I know have had contact and made many new friends.
In the process of starting a business, you should solve the monthly problems yourself. This involves finding all kinds of people, so I met many "interesting people".
I have seen many friends whose Mac software and genuine content are more expensive than computers (although I spend more on research apps than on iphone), and I have also seen many friends who are extremely strict about their work efficiency and work details. For example, O and F in OmniFocus must be capitalized, or they will scratch your head immediately. In the past, not everyone reached this level when issuing audit reports in the firm. I have seen many friends maintain the four major work intensities in the peak season all year round.
Among the friends I met and knew, I was deeply encouraged and admired by @ Yagan and @ Sun Wu's enthusiasm and attitude towards entrepreneurship. Their work efficiency made my top four feel ashamed.
For example, Yagan and I spent 1 hour discussing my entrepreneurial project during lunch, during which we talked about my time management and knowledge management practices. He said, I think there is someone you should meet. Half an hour later, I saw the sun. The three of us chatted for a while and got to know each other after a short meeting, which was very speculative. At that time, it was suggested that the three of us set up a charging study experiment online. The course is the cooperation of the three of us, focusing on GTD, time management, knowledge management and teamwork, with practical exercises and specific scenarios as the core. After 20 minutes, the form, content and outline of the course were all finalized and shared with our chat group in the form of OmniOutliner. We have received the time, place and theme of the next party in the calendar. 1 hour later, the chat is over and everyone is busy. Just after 1 hour, I received the main idea of Sun Wu's course, and his part has been completed (both professionalism and aesthetics are shocking). In the evening, three people's WeChat circle of friends posted the status of this class notice, and the favorite people were pulled into the class notice group, and more than 300 potential customers gathered together. Later, it successfully transformed nearly 100 paying users.
This incident has shocked me too much. This kind of thing, this kind of efficiency in PSF, even any mature company, such as accounting firms, is possible. Now, everyone I meet is doing something for themselves and doing what they like. You should become good at it quickly. Entrepreneurs must be able to support themselves instead of waiting for the organization to pay them.
To put it simply, the things and people we meet now are really amazing.
I'm going to meet some investors next week. No matter what the result is, I know I will stick to it. The project I am working on is bound to be more difficult, not a slogan, and my own funds are limited, but I will stick to it. Spending half a day writing this article is also a public commitment not to give up.
The article is very long, and I know I'm verbose again. The principle of my writing in Zhihu is to write only about learning and self-management, introduce theory and thinking, and emphasize action and change. As a result, I often make the mistake of writing too long and want to say a lot in an article. I'll change it in the future and write it more interestingly. Sorry, friends who don't like reading long articles.