Easy Accounting Basics for the Business Owner Who Hates Numbers

I’m in a circle of “accidental” business people, who came to this life through chance or happenstance or some other career decision that didn’t really look like “business” when we made it. I thought the choice I was making looked like “art,” myself, and funny, but there’s money at the bottom of that field, if you want to live off your work.

I took accounting in college. I was baffled. I’ve taken accounting classes from the SBA. I was bored. I’ve looked at QuickBooks. I can balance my checkbook, and do my own taxes, and that’s about where my understanding of what happens with money stops. Ellen’s two books are lifesavers for people in my position. I came to her work through “How Much Should I Charge?,” which I think has a more immediate impact to people in service businesses. Although she (being an accounting type) thinks you should have a chart of accounts first, you can actually work the program laid out in HMSIC? first. However, buy the pair. You’ll need WDTMG? soon enough, and why pay two shipping charges?

People who are good at accounting have trouble, in my experience, understanding how foreign the thinking can be to those of us who are fluent in other forms of thinking. If you are fluent in accounting and financial language, you may find this book simplistic. Simply walk away, or buy a caselot and give a copy to all of your clients who go cross-eyed when you try explaining their balance sheet. I have not met a CPA in the real world who can explain money as clearly as WDTMG?

I only wish I had a way to let more people know about this resource.

Where Did the Money Go?” target=”_blank”>Where did the money go?

Best of Groopman’s books, IMO

I’ve read Groopman’s other books, and while it’s useful to know about how my doctors make up their minds, it’s much more important to me to understand the factors going on in my conscious and unconscious mind. This also applies to the people-as-patients who are close to me as they make decisions about medical treatment.

Some people are unhappy because Groopman & Hartzband fail to make the case for how to convince patients to follow the statistically best course of treatment, while missing the point that for most of our medical decisions, there may not be a “best” treatment. OK, colonoscopy is the gold standard for intestinal cancer screening. Fine. But there simply aren’t all that many “best” options, and almost any medical intervention varies hugely according to patient expectations, willingness, acceptance, income, etc. etc. and so forth.

The statistics about how many “best” treatments changed every year were the most interesting to me. HRT, no HRT; vitamins or not, drugs that work and then get yanked; surgeries that are found to be less than ideal. It rather strikes me that the act of believing in a “best” is possibly as irrational as any factor patients bring into the examining room.

Perhaps, if all patients truly understood statistics, we would make different decisions. Perhaps, if more doctors understood the reality of a patient’s experience with a treatment protocol and how it fits into a life, they would make different recommendations. Hard to say.

My best friend is evaluating a serious, expensive, and necessary but not urgent surgery. Her family medical “story” is vastly different from mine. Reading about other people’s backstories helps me get a handle on why she processes information one way, and I take similar data and go a different direction. This surgery is too new for there to be any useful “best” statistics, not unlike the chapter about making transplant decisions. Her processing is simply her way of thinking, not necessarily “full of cognitive errors.” This surgery could involve input from four different specialists, at least two of whom will need to be in the OR at the same time. They make a plausible case for why each is the better expert for her problem. They have stats. However, statistics fail in an N = 1 decision, when every 1 who faces this situation is significantly different from every other 1.

Your Medical Mind is NOT a checklist, or step-by-step, or even a deliberate guide to making the “right” medical decision, primarily because there is no such thing as the “right” decision, most of the time. It’s all a series of trade-offs, bartering an expected but unknown future outcome against a very present-day option. The best any of us can really do is understand what we bring to the table. I happen to think reading other people’s stories as examples of their decision-making process is a pretty good way to help me think about mine.

The book is also useful for directing conversation with the people in your life for whom you may be asked to make medical decisions, such as parents, partners, and children. I had not recognized how nearly completely useless my own medical directive documents are in the event of a near-death experience, and I’m (statistically) ahead of most in that I have the documents at all.

Every time I step into a medical practice, I sign a paper that says I will be, in the end, responsible for the charges if/when my insurance company is done. In the long run, I am also responsible for the outcome. Should it turn out “wrong,” I may have recourse and get money, but it’s still my body that’s broken, and my life to rebuild after. As such, understanding my side of the decision is totally my responsibility. IMO, Groopman and Hartzband could have gone a bit farther down this path.

Your Medical Mind

I found this book in the store and read it right there in the aisle. All the way through. Put it back on the shelf thinking, “OK, I know that…” Walked away. Came back. Put the book in my shopping cart (nice bookstore, that, with a cart so you don’t have to lug your books all over).

Ten little rules, LOTS of white space, instant comprehension, and a LIFETIME to learn. “leave out the parts the readers tend to skip.” If only I could do that on the first pass! OR the 23rd!! (and there are my three exclamation points, so I’m all used up for the next 99,800+- words…)

I have Stephen King On Writing. I have Robert Bly. All my books on how to be a better writer serve their purpose. 10 Rules for Writing will go on the shelf next to the others, and I’ll bet it comes down a whole lot more often. When I need to remember that beautiful books and great book design matter. When I need to be reminded that it really is pretty simple. I spend a whole lot more on a whole lot less. Three fancy coffees will leave only weight gain; this little book might actually make a difference in my life.

By the way, the Limited Edition, hardback version, is a delight to experience. Wonderful paper, great printing, fab design. Splurge on this.

The First Hundred Million is a charming book, almost scary in its faith and innocence, written in 1927 with no idea that the financial end of the era was looming. You won’t skyrocket your own book’s sales using the titling information in this book–in that much, the one-star reviewer and I are in agreement. However: if you read Ogilvie on Advertising, or The Science of Advertising, or anybody on split testing, or if you think split testing was something Google forced us to invent for AdWords–read E. Haldeman Julius.

My stars, he’s verbose! Never use one word where five will do. But he’s linear, and clear, and the words aren’t that out of date even if we don’t write like that anymore. We don’t need to buy a dollar’s worth of nickel books to hide what we wanted to know about sex. We don’t read for quite the same reasons, maybe. Hard to say–I saw some of those titles and wondered if I should write an info product on the topics to sell today. If they needed to know the material in 1927, they sure aren’t getting taught it today.

Seriously–if you study advertising that works, this is a book you should have at hand. I don’t read a lot in history, so I don’t know what it’s like to read the original sources in the original. This particular edition is well produced and easy to read, totally affordable, and entertaining in its own way. I got my money’s worth.