Master Learning And Your Experience Will Help You Account For More Financial Success

If you treat new challenges as barriers to progress

, chances are that your life will be very circumscribed. Here's an example. Daunted by the narrow, twisting one-way streets and aggressive drivers, many Boston, Massachusetts suburbanites never visit the downtown area despite its world-class cultural institutions, famous historical sites, exciting sports teams, outstanding hospitals, highly regarded universities and colleges, and lively entertainment venues.

You might think that such self-limiting behavior would only appear in conservative, old-line New England. Yet I often run into the same avoidance among people who live in New York City's suburbs where visitors to Manhattan have many more attractive travel choices than Bostonians do, including many fine commuter trains, express buses, and in-town taxis and car services to make getting around relatively painless for easily overwhelmed people.

While musing about people who would rather miss out than take on a new challenge, I was reminded of my first trip to England. Being used to traveling on the ubiquitous high-speed freeways in southern California, my original home, I was struck by how short the distances were between tourist sites in southern England.

Although many people told me to take the train to save money, it seemed better to me to save time so that I could see more. I rented a car instead.

There were two miscalculations in that decision that enabled me to emotionally experience such travel challenges. First, having driven on the "right" side of the road for my entire life, I found it hard to shift over to being on the "wrong" (or "left") side of the road. English car horns got quite a lot of use and many English nerves were undoubtedly frayed as drivers desperately scrambled to get out of my way as I came out of roundabouts facing them head-on.

Second, the roads were a lot narrower and slower than I had expected. Anytime I got over thirty miles an hour, it seemed as if I would encounter another town where I had to crawl through another market center in first gear.

Nevertheless, by the end of two weeks on the "not-so" open road, I felt like an old hand. Should someone challenge me to drive in Japan on the "wrong" side of the road, I'd probably give it a try even though the driving issues there are much more difficult than the ones I faced in England.

While musing about my driving experiences in England and how they accelerated my learning, I recalled the much more substantial educational challenges experienced by Mrs. Soeum Sok, an MBA graduate of Rushmore University. I wondered how those who are frightened of traffic would deal with her experiences.

Born in Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge victory, her educational opportunities looked extremely bleak at first. Her family was evacuated from Phnom Penh to the provinces where they lived in misery during the Pol Pot regime. Educated people were compelled to become agricultural laborers during that time of poor harvests and widespread hunger.

After the Khmer Rouge lost power, her family was able to return to Phnom Penh and she started school, something many children around the world take for granted.

Mrs. Sok did well in her studies, graduating from high school at age 14. Being so young meant that no university would let her begin studies. In Cambodia at the time, few people could speak any international languages. Seeing that circumstance as an interesting opportunity, she decided to learn English and French as a temporary substitute for university studies.

Within a year, her new language skills helped to gain a position as an intern doing simple accounting in a hotel. After two years of this work, she entered the university, studying Cambodian law.

After graduating from the two-year law program, Mrs. Sok began working for the United Nations. When the UN mandate expired, she took a short-term position as an executive secretary to the general manager of a service apartment where she supervised the local staff, handled administrative tasks, and assisted the general manager with his accounting work.

Within months, Mrs. Sok gained a highly desirable position that she held for many years with an international nonprofit organization where she performed secretarial and administrative tasks, including preparing the payroll and maintaining the petty cash account. Because she wanted to do as good a job as possible, she enrolled in an accounting course at a private school.

Looking forward to learning even more, she enrolled next at the University of San Francisco, taking courses in Cambodia about constitutional and contractual law.

Wanting also to earn some extra money, Mrs. Sok took a part-time job translating French into English for a newspaper.

In early 2000, she accepted a very exciting new position in Cambodia with yet another international nonprofit, handling all administrative aspects of the office there. She was pleased to be sent to a training course in finance.

From these experiences, she developed an interest in learning more about finance, banking, and accounting so she could become a financial manager. A friend recommended earning an MBA degree at an online university.

While investigating various schools, Mrs. Sok decided that earning an MBA degree would provide the knowledge needed to gain a financial management job in an economically advanced country. Because she hadn't taken any math classes in a long time, she was concerned about whether she would be able to keep up with a challenging finance and accounting curriculum of a business school.

Fortunately, her natural curiosity and experience with learning many new tasks concerning administration, accounting, and finance that needed to be conducted using her foreign language skills served her well, and her business studies went smoothly.

You may be expecting me to tell you now that Mrs. Sok has a senior financial executive's job in Europe or the United States. That's not the case.

While earning her MBA, she moved from Cambodia to a country outside of the Anglophone sphere where her new business knowledge didn't directly apply. She didn't let that unexpected geographical shift bother her. After graduating, she began learning the accounting and financial practices of her new country.

The good news is that the knowledge of accounting and finance Mrs. Sok gained from earning an MBA made it much easier to learn another set of accounting financial rules. As a consequence, she has made rapid progress and should soon be prepared to prosper in her new country.

It's a fine career step to reach after starting as a rural refugee in her own country at a time when agriculture and the economy collapsed so that many people starved. Just think how many people in Cambodia didn't make the effort she did to overcome any lost educational opportunities as youngsters so that they could be prepared to prosper in the global economy where knowledge of international languages and methods of operating are essential to competing.

What's the lesson for you?

When your master learning, your experience will help you account for more financial success. As a result, you'll be able to travel to wherever your interests and talents can take you. What a blessing!

by: Donald Mitchell

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