Things worth writing down

Most of what I’ve done at AANKA is unglamorous: matching prices across delivery apps, agreeing one version of a menu, making a report send itself so nobody has to ask for it. None of it is clever.

But you cannot improve a number you cannot see. Almost every interesting problem I’ve been handed turned out to be a boring problem underneath — a figure nobody owned, a process that existed in someone’s head, a price that had drifted on one platform and not the others.

The temptation with AI is to start at the impressive end. I’ve found the opposite works better: fix the thing that is merely tedious, prove it holds, then reach for something harder.

The ACCA is a lot of technical material, and I’d be lying if I said I remembered all of it. What stayed is narrower and more useful: how to read a set of numbers and work out what question they were built to answer.

Strategic Business Leader was the one that changed how I work. It is not really a test of knowledge — it is a test of whether you can take a badly organised pile of information and produce something a busy person can act on. That is most of my week now.

Doing it outside school also meant nobody set the pace. That is harder than it sounds and it is the part I’d actually recommend to someone considering it.

I don’t think the ACCA will mean much in fifteen years. AI is going to take a lot of what accountants, managers and admin people do — automate it, or raise the bar so high that the technical part stops being the hard part.

That doesn’t bother me, because the certificate was never the asset. What it proved about me is — that I can hold something difficult for two years and finish it. That doesn’t expire, and neither does the seven-year head start.

What actually appreciates is taste, and the ability to point a machine at the boring ninety per cent while spending your own judgement on the ten per cent that’s left — well enough that the result doesn’t look like it came from a machine. That’s the bet. The exams were just a way of proving I could learn fast enough to make it.

People told me they studied fourteen hours a day for three months and locked themselves away. I think most of that is nonsense. I did the ACCA and kept my weekends, went out the night before exams, went to the mall, never missed a show I was watching.

I won’t pretend it cost nothing — it cost me the art classes I loved, and I still haven’t gone back. But that’s a real, specific price, not the heroic all-or-nothing story people like to tell.

Take a thing as seriously as it needs to be taken, and not one notch more. The people who make it look impossible are usually the ones performing the effort rather than doing the work.