On education, racehorses, and accounting

So no one showed up for the class that I spent time creating.  Ok.  That’s fine.  I can deal with that.  What I can’t deal with is someone that won’t learn the material on their own.  People have to learn, and you can’t drag them where they don’t want to go.  As I’ve heard said once, race horses don’t run with donkeys.  Race horses run with race horses.  Donkeys run with donkeys.  You get a collection of donkeys together, and you’re not going anywhere fast.  Get a collection of race horses together, and you’ll go places.  What happens when you combine the two?  The race horses run and the donkeys don’t.  So you have to get rid of the donkeys or the race horses will take off running and never come back.  Which group do you want to build a company with: the slow, unmotivated, and un-teachable or the fast, motivated, lightning bolts?

I’ve been working on accounting issues today.  It’s hard trying to describe to those who are not accountants why the numbers have to be perfect if the numbers balance.  I took a few classes in college.  Maybe two or three.  And I can explain a little bit.  But not everything.  Four hours later, it seems I can come up with how to describe to non-accountants why the accountant demands everything be balanced a certain way.  But I finally convinced them.  Granted, they had to look at a few numbers themselves.  But I think they got it.

On the subject of accounting, I’ve changed my budget up a bit.  The gas reimbursement checks I get have thrown my entire budget for a loop since they started.  Based on what I drive, I get a giant check, and then have to spend just as much of it the next week gas again, which causes instability in the budget.  Problem is, I’ve got too much debt to just throw the gas check in a separate account.  But then I realized, I’ve been budgeting a specific amount of money from the gas check to stay in the regular account.  So what happens when I flip the equation?  Instead of putting the entire thing in, and assuming a certain amount is going to be there to prop up the budget, put the gas check in a separate account and transfer the remaining that would have been used to prop up the account as a single amount.  Because the single amount stays the same.  And then I can take gas out and get it in its own account, where it will be a small tornado, separated from the rent and food.  We’ll see.