Yesterday, I was admitted to practice before the United States Tax Court.
An upcoming article will explain what that means and the history of it. But I wanted to write this article over my morning cappuccino.
That is a sentence I have wanted to be able to write for a very long time.
It should feel like an arrival.
And it does. Sort of.
I am proud of it. Extremely proud, actually. Becoming a United States Tax Court Practitioner is difficult. It requires a substantial amount of study, a difficult examination, an interview, and significant waiting.
Not easy for an impatient person.
I wanted it.
I worked for it.
I got it.
And almost immediately, my brain started asking what was next.
There is always a next.
Another credential or license. Another class. Another project. Another business idea. Another thing to improve. Another thing I should be doing that I am currently not doing.
I have apparently developed the remarkable ability to turn an accomplishment into a baseline almost immediately.
Yesterday’s dream becomes today’s normal.
Then we go looking for tomorrow’s dream.
I am starting to think this may be a personality defect. I’m not sure that I have always had this, but I do know I have for at least the last several years.
For most of my life, I have had some version of a finish line out in front of me.
Once I get through this tax season.
Once I get that credential.
Once the business reaches this revenue amount.
Once I launch that project.
Then I’ll relax.
Then I’ll feel successful.
Then I’ll have more time.
This has, of course, been nonsense.
The finish line has wheels.
Every time I get close to it, I quietly move it farther down the road.
There was a time when becoming an Enrolled Agent seemed like an enormous accomplishment. Then I became one.
Owning my own firm sounded like success. Then I did that.
Teaching nationally sounded like a pretty good marker.
And now the Tax Court.
Check enough boxes and eventually, surely, some internal voice will say, “Good job. You may stop now.”
Apparently that voice does not exist.
The absurdity of this became particularly clear to me this week.
Yesterday, I was admitted to practice before the United States Tax Court.
This morning, I was reading conference evaluations from classes I had taught.
Most were fine. Some were very good.
One person wrote:
“I was bored.”
And would you like to guess which one my brain decided was important?
Apparently, being admitted to the United States Tax Court is no match for one anonymous conference attendee who was bored.
That is objectively hilarious.
I can see the absurdity. I know some speakers who never read evaluations. I read them all, usually multiple times, make notes, and try to improve.
It is also revealing.
There will always be another person to gain the approval of. Another metric. Another review. Another credential. Another person who thinks you’re wonderful.
And another person who was bored.
Or dislikes you.
If success requires unanimous approval, I have selected a particularly stupid game.
Unanimous approval does not exist.
I would love to blame all of this entirely on my own neuroses. Because we are all flawed, and that would be an easy explanation.
Some of it certainly belongs on me.
But modern life seems to reward the same pathology.
We are supposed to grow. Scale. Optimize. Build. Improve. Network. Learn. Create a personal brand. Monetize the personal brand. Start a newsletter. Start a podcast. Become a thought leader.
Whatever that may mean.
Apparently, thinking is no longer sufficient. One must lead thoughts.
Or, worse yet, influence them.
The dreaded influencer.
Even our hobbies have become suspiciously productive.
If you run, track the pace. If you read, track the books. If you write, publish it. If you make something, perhaps you should sell it.
God forbid we simply enjoy something.
And then we invented “work-life balance,” which sounds healthy until you realize we have somehow turned work-life balance into another thing to be good at.
Now we can fail professionally and fail at relaxing.
Excellent.
I am especially susceptible to this because I genuinely enjoy my work. Tax interests me. Technology interests me. Teaching interests me. Writing interests me.
That makes it very easy to forget one important fact:
Work is not a hobby.
Even interesting work.
There should be parts of life that don’t need to justify themselves through usefulness.
A bookstore does not need to make me smarter.
Coffee does not need to make me more productive.
Sometimes I should be able to drink a cappuccino and have the accomplishment be that I drank a cappuccino.
Preferably a good one. Goldchild in San Diego, for the record.
There is another danger in professional accomplishment.
The more letters you accumulate after your name, the easier it would be to start believing your own press release.
Passing a difficult examination means something. I worked very hard for this one, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in the name of false humility.
But passing an exam does not mean I know everything.
It means I passed a difficult exam on a given day.
A credential demonstrates knowledge and competence.
It does not confer omniscience.
The more I learn about tax, the more obvious it becomes how much there is to know.
I will still have to research things.
I will still need to ask people smarter than me.
Spoiler alert: if you’re the smartest person in the room, find a new room.
I will still be wrong.
And I hope I never lose the ability to say:
I don’t know. Let me look at that.
I would be deeply suspicious of any tax professional who passed a difficult examination and concluded that there was nothing left to learn.
There is also a tendency to turn achievement into a very neat personal story.
I worked hard.
I persevered.
I succeeded.
All true.
But incomplete.
In 2012, President Obama gave a speech that produced one of the more famous out-of-context political lines of the era:
“You didn’t build that.”
It became an argument about whether successful people deserved credit for what they had built. But the larger point was simpler: successful people do not materialize in isolation.
Somebody taught you.
Somebody answered a question.
Somebody opened a door.
Somebody built the road.
Somebody helped.
We like to tell clean stories about individual achievement.
Real life is messier, and more communal, than that.
I passed the exam.
I studied for it. I sat for it. I answered the questions.
Nobody could do those things for me.
But I did not arrive there alone.
There were people who taught me tax law before I knew enough to understand how little I knew. People who answered questions, challenged me, recommended books, gave me opportunities, encouraged me, and believed I could do something before I was entirely convinced myself.
There were also people who simply tolerated me talking about and obsessing over the Tax Court exam for an unreasonable amount of time.
My spouse, in particular.
Preparing for a challenging exam can create some turbulence.
Especially when you treat passing it as a life-or-death matter.
Those people are part of the accomplishment too.
Acknowledging that does not diminish individual effort.
It makes the story accurate.
I worked very hard for this.
And I did not do it alone.
Both are true.
Maybe this is part of why accomplishment makes me uncomfortable.
I am deeply wary of arrogance.
It makes me recoil.
We have plenty of it. From the highest levels of government to business, media, academia, and nearly every profession, there are people who seem absolutely convinced that success also made them the smartest person in every room.
I find it one of the most unattractive traits a person can have.
Confidence is useful.
Competence matters.
But arrogance is something different.
Arrogance is the inability to imagine that you might still have something to learn.
I never want the letters after my name to become a substitute for curiosity.
I never want to become so invested in appearing knowledgeable that I cannot admit when I don’t know something.
But maybe I have been so concerned about arrogance that I have occasionally forgotten I am allowed to be proud.
Pride says:
I worked hard for this, and I am glad I did it.
Arrogance says:
I accomplished this, therefore I am superior.
Those are not the same thing.
I don’t want to become less ambitious.
I like building things. I like learning. I like tackling something difficult and figuring it out.
But there is a difference between wanting more because life is interesting and needing more because what I already have never feels sufficient.
I am not always sure which one is driving.
One creates possibility.
The other creates a life in which the present is perpetually auditioning for the future.
And that seems like a particularly bad way to spend a limited amount of time.
Because there is one fact that eventually ruins the entire exercise of keeping score.
One day I am going to die.
So are you.
I realize this is not the traditional inspirational ending.
But death does have a remarkable ability to clarify things.
We behave as though we can eventually get time under control. Become more efficient. More organized. More disciplined. Get ahead.
We can’t.
Time wins.
And when mine runs out, I find it very difficult to imagine anyone standing around discussing the letters after my name.
Nobody at my funeral is going to care how many continuing education classes I taught.
They probably will not discuss my revenue.
I certainly hope nobody reads my Twitter/X profile.
What will matter?
Whether I was kind.
Whether I showed up.
Whether I made people laugh.
Whether I helped when helping was inconvenient.
Whether the people around me felt better or worse because I was there.
And, in my case, whether a few animals had better lives because they happened to cross mine.
That may sound like a small ambition from someone who has spent so much of his life pursuing larger ones.
It isn’t.
If, when all of this is over, someone can say that I gave a few animals a better life, good food, ridiculous amounts of affection, veterinary care when they needed it, and the absolute certainty that they were loved, I think I will have done something worthwhile.
They will never know what credentials I had.
They will not know what an Enrolled Agent is.
They definitely will not care that I was admitted to practice before the United States Tax Court.
A dog does not care about your résumé.
A dog has never once asked to see my evaluation scores.
They care that you came home.
There is something wonderfully humbling about that.
Maybe the word I have been looking for isn’t success.
Maybe it is enough.
Enough is a difficult word for ambitious people because it sounds suspiciously like settling.
And I hate settling.
“Good enough” has never been a philosophy that appeals to me.
But that is not what I mean by enough.
Enough doesn’t mean I stop building or learning or wanting things.
It means wanting something tomorrow does not require me to declare today inadequate.
Maybe I need to learn to hold several truths at once:
I worked hard for this.
I had help.
I am proud.
I still have much to learn.
I want more.
And this is already enough.
Yesterday, I was admitted to the bar of the United States Tax Court.
Today my brain has already produced a list of other things I should accomplish.
I am still me.
I will keep building things. I will keep setting goals. I will probably continue moving the finish line when I am not paying attention.
But I would like to get better at remembering that eventually the finish line stops moving.
There will be a last project.
A last class.
A last email.
A last cappuccino.
A last ordinary Tuesday.
And when that happens, none of the things I spent so much time proving will matter nearly as much as how I spent the time between now and then.
Maybe success is not being remembered as impressive.
Maybe it is being remembered as kind.
We need more of that in the world.
And if, when all of this is over, the world contained a few happier people and a few animals who knew they were loved because I was here, that will be enough.