Thinking Outside the Box

Letting your creativity flow.

It has been a while since I wrote. It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to write. My brain has simply been void of ideas. Every so often, I felt my brain start to grasp one, but by the time I reached for my notebook, it had gone poof.

Writer’s block is hardly unheard of. Still, as an administrative accountant in the public sector, most of what I write about in my nine-to-five concerns financial details and procedures. Writing here is completely different from my normal workday, and I enjoy that difference.

I think we have a nasty culture in America that says you should only do things if you get paid. It has even reached our hobbies. But for me, writing is about the experience and the outlet, not something I expect to ever make money from. It is about the joy and the challenge of shaping an article or poem, rather than worrying about who it will cater to or how much money it will make. Writing has always brought me joy.

In grade school, middle school, high school, and even college, I wrote in my free time. None of those stories exist anymore. They were burned, shredded, wiped, or deleted, which may have been an unnecessarily dramatic archival policy. But I remember some of them.

There was the story I wrote in middle school in which Jesus interrupted a battle during the American Civil War by floating down on a pink cloud. There was a story about a fictional tree that watched the entire civilization of mankind. There were poems dedicated to blackbirds, written while I sat in accounting courses in Lincoln.

All of these writings brought me joy. Not because I was paid. Most of them were never shared with anyone. The joy came from bringing the thoughts in my head onto paper. Something that had existed only in my imagination suddenly had words, sentences, and a life outside of me. As I grow older, I want to explore that feeling again. Here.

I don’t ever expect writing to become my profession. I simply want to become a better writer. I also want a space where I can give my ideas room to flourish. I want to catch them and let them grow before they go poof.

Writing is a creative outlet. It is something I want to master, although I doubt I ever will. Still, chasing that dream is a thrill. Writing is an art form. All art is creative. What’s more, all work is also creative. People may not think of accounting as a creative profession, but it can be.

The problem is that both accountants and the people who observe accountants often think only within the limits of what accounting is supposed to be. Numbers, spreadsheets, reports. Maybe even a calculator, for the atmosphere. But accounting, like writing, painting, photography, and storytelling, involves taking separate pieces and finding a way to make them mean something.

Accountants are given large amounts of data to examine. We are presented with problems and asked to find answers. For example, I was once challenged to provide a list of equipment that met specific criteria. A common approach would be to manually pull the equipment into a query, add a VLOOKUP here and there, and reconcile it against another list to confirm that everything had been captured. That process could take an entire day. I know because I have watched colleagues spend an entire day doing it.

Repeating the same steps over and over is not especially creative. The creative question is how I can build a process that reaches the same conclusion with a snap of the fingers, as though I had a magic wand that could conjure it out of thin air. That is where accounting becomes a playground.

The first step is figuring out where the data is stored and how to bring it into that playground. The playground can be any system you want to build the report in. There are many different platforms, and it sometimes feels as though 90 percent of the accounting world lives in Excel. But there are other playgrounds. I have used PeopleSoft, Cognos, Axiom, SAP, Tableau, Power BI, and many other accounting and finance programs to tell these stories. I have even used Stata, which, as an accountant, I probably should not admit is my favorite playground.

One wonderful thing about data is that it is all different, yet somehow all the same. There are rows and columns. Some variables use different formats. Some are coded. Some are dummy variables. But eventually, there are just rows and columns.

Data can represent almost anything. A dummy variable could indicate whether someone grew up with loving parents, is a billionaire, or likes cats. Those things are profoundly different, but inside the data, they may all appear as ones and zeroes. When you think about it, all data stored on a computer is technically made up of ones and zeroes.

The second step is using the playground to build the report. I like to think of this as the sandcastle in the playground. The data is the foundation, the sand. The program is the box holding the sand. The reports are the castles you build.

There are many tools available, but some of the most useful are joins. Joins connect tables. Once you understand left joins, right joins, anti-left joins, anti-right joins, full outer joins, inner joins, and cross joins, the world is at your table. You can build almost any castle you want. I know there will be some accountant out there thinking, “So what? I have VLOOKUP.”

But VLOOKUP has limitations. So does INDEX MATCH. Even the newer XLOOKUP cannot always replace a well-designed join. One of the largest problems with older lookup methods is the way they handle, or fail to handle, null values. Any sandcastle that does not account for nulls is already beginning to crumble.

This stage is also the most enjoyable. It might take minutes, hours, days, or sometimes weeks. It is where thinking outside the box becomes a skill rather than a slogan. You can add values, create dummy variables, connect thousands of tables, build calculations, automate processes, and finally add VBA that produces a random Harry Potter quotation whenever the program runs. Naturally, that is the most important part of the castle. Harry Potter did live in one, after all.

One of the greatest things I have found for improving my thinking is taking courses outside of accounting. I have taken courses in political science, economics, and public administration, all of which have given me different perspectives on data. The more courses I take, the more my accounting skills improve. New ideas give me new ways to approach familiar problems.

And this isn’t limited only to courses. Expressing myself through art has also been beneficial. From taking photographs, both digitally and on film, to making videos, these activities have also strengthened my accounting skills. I truly believe that the more we allow ourselves to write, journal, photograph, paint, build, experiment, or tell stories, the more creative we become in the rest of our lives.

Once one castle is built, it is on to the next. Like an architect, I hope the next castle will dwarf the ones I have already built. That is the exciting part. The next castle.

Writing works the same way. When I finish a post and love it, I begin thinking about the next one. The same is true of photographs, movies, and everything else I create. Creativity does not end when something is finished. It simply gives us another idea to chase, hopefully before it goes poof.