Photo by bbsc30 @ flickr

My ideal job, while I am still yong without my own family, would involved living in a foreign country for a year to two years, and then moving on to another one. I am not picky about wanting to be in western Europe, or English-speaking countries. I would be quite happy in Latin America or eastern Europe.

So I tried inquiring about what kinds of skills or clients I should work on to make me a better candidate for international options. So far, everyone’s answer has been that you only get a chance to travel internationally once you reach the manager level, and that there’s nothing you can do to change this.

I’ve decided to stay optimistic, and be skeptical of this advice. There must be some sort of area I can gain expertise in that would make me especially useful for working in international offices. I just have to figure out what that might be. Any ideas?

I’ve always had this vague desire to run my own business. The problem is, it’s business itself that I’m passionate, not any particular craft or trade. That’s why I decided to go into accounting, because you get to work with the foundation and underlying parts of the company that make it all run. Also, in audit, you get to work at several different clients, which suits my attention-span more than committing to my own start-up.

A successful start-up takes a lot of work, dedication, and even then is likely to fail. I honestly don’t feel innovative enough to be an entrepreneur like the guy who started Starbucks, etc.

A lot of the big companies we work on seem to form by just buying up a bunch of other companies, packaging their products together, and not actually making anything new. That takes a huge amount of existing capital though, and of course, you would need to be pretty familiar with an industry to see how to pull off something like that.

If starting a business were something I really wanted to do, I am seeing how working in something like public accounting gives you the opportunity to learn about industries, make connections, and get some real-world experience. So if you want to run your own company someday, here is my vote for majoring in accounting!

So on New Years, you’re supposed to make resolutions. However, goal-setting works better if you only have one or two goals at a time, and I have a lot of things I want to get done this year.

In order to accomplish goals, I know I need to be specific about how I’m going to accomplish them. For example, I’d like to exercise more, but I can’t think of a time I can set aside to go out and run, because I’ll have to get up for work at about 5 and who knows when I’ll get home. So I might make a goal to work on strength exercises every day, even if I can’t run.

There’s nothing worse than setting goals that you can never actually reach. I wouldn’t be motivated to try to reach it at all! So I’m going to keep working on my goals over the next few days. One of them might be to stop procrastinating . . . haha, so maybe I’ll get them done on Sunday night!

Happy New Year!