Charles Leikauf argues that accountants avoid fractional CFO work not because they lack opportunity but because they doubt their own intelligence. He says brain capacity varies minimally between people, and success comes down to practice and mindset, not innate smartness.
Do you see when an accountant starts picking up fractional CFO clients that they enlist their friends?
No, usually they don't. If people knew about the economic opportunity that fractional CFO was, like, people would be stopping what they're doing in their tracks and starting to offer fractional CFO services. But a lot of people don't just because they have all these like weird beliefs that like aren't true. Like, I had a lady comment on one of my videos yesterday. She's like, this sounds hard. And I was like, it's okay. Like, you can learn totally fine. You know, you've learned all these things in your life. Like, you weren't able to walk one day and look at you now, you're running around town, right? And she's like, no, I don't think I'm actually really that smart. And I was like, um, I can't help you. You know, that's not like a Charles question. That's like a, you know, you need to go to therapy question. Like, whatever you believe to some degree becomes true. I believe we're all about the same kind of level of smartness. People will disagree who have lots of their ego wrapped up in being smart, but I think we all have about the same brain capacity, you know, give or take one standard deviation, 10%, whatever it is. If you think about it like that, I don't think people are materially like smarter than each other on like a normal scale. Like, your average person isn't 4 times smarter than the next person next to them. And to be honest, there's People who are air quotes less smart than me who make way more money and who are way more successful and way happier. So if that's true, which it is, and there's also people who are way smarter than me who are not doing as well as me. If all that's true, like, you shouldn't worry about like smarts. You're as smart as you decide to be. There's a stereotype here in the States that like, oh, Asian people are smart, whatever, they're good at math. I don't think like any one culture is genetically better at math. I think maybe that their parents make them do more homework when they're growing up. Cool, so they get more reps. It's like, oh, that guy next to me, his biceps are bigger than mine. Oh yeah, he maybe have done more curls and eaten the right food longer than you have. Cool, he doesn't have anything that you can't have. There's crazy exceptions for the most part, but a lot of people give up before they start, and that's a really dangerous mindset. Like, you get to decide whatever outcome you have. Might take you a little bit longer than you want, but like, you get to choose the life that you want. You only get one of these lives, so like, choose the best life possible, or choose to be a loser. It's also fine. Whatever. Makes me sad if you choose that.
