Beauty In The Numbers

The accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility.

So I split the difference and kept moving forward.

Life is growth.

Business is growth.

You grow or you die.

While auditing companies, digging into their guts, taking them apart, and putting them back together, I was also learning how they survived, or didn’t.

How they sold things, or didn’t. How they got into trouble, how they got out. I took careful notes about what made companies tick, what made them fail.

In a column of otherwise unspectacular fours and nines and twos, I could discern the raw elements of Beauty.

I looked at numbers the way the poet looks at clouds, the way the geologist looks at rocks. I could draw from them demotic truths and uncanny predictions.

Day after day I saw something I'd never thought possible: Accounting could be an art.

𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘐 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘯𝘶𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭.

On some level I understood that numbers represented a secret code, that behind every row of numbers lay ethereal Platonic forms.

I have a fierce respect for numbers and the accountability they hold.

ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ʏᴏᴜʀ ɴᴜᴍʙᴇʀs sᴀʏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ.