February 14th, 2014 | Uncategorized
After seeing the new Wolf of Wall Street movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio and also attending my International Finance course two times a week, I seem to have money on the brain.
It was really interesting to take this international finance course because it brought me back to my corporate working days before coming to Ireland. Many may not know this but I didn’t graduate in the class of 2013 like the majority of the scholars in this program. I graduated from college in 2012 and immediately started working as an accountant for a large international corporation who’s headquarters were in center city Philadelphia.
Just two weeks before coming to Ireland I was working with balance sheets, income statements, and profit and loss accounts, so on the first day of class when my professor was going through the details of financial statements that businesses frequently use, I was having flashbacks to working with these exact documents. Business is really interesting to me because I think it’s amazing to watch investments and ideas grow into huge successes within a matter of months and or years. And on the other side of the coin, watching huge successes fail just as fast is also amusing.
Having classmates from all parts of the world and coming from different backgrounds listening to my professor discuss the concepts of international business, it dawned on me that regardless of what language or currency you are familiar with, the ultimate goal remains the same. Everyone wants to be successful. Whether you measure success in how much money you make, how many friends you have, or how happy you are, we are all looking for some way to be successful. Now the question remains how does that happen? What I learned from watching the Wolf of Wall Street and learning about the success and failures of many different business ventures, is that judging success in money alone isn’t necessarily the best measure. I think it’s important to remember that it may not always be dollar signs that measure success because money will come and go, just as the stock market continues to fluctuate every single day. I find it’s more the intangible things that measure success that is the most important, because when all of your money and possessions are gone what will you have left?
