There’s something I’ve never been able to forget since the day I was forced to learn accounting.
I’m not an accountant. But I had to study it. Read the books, worked through the concepts, and somewhere in the middle of all that I found something that sounds simple but carries real weight: accounting is infinite.
There’s no true beginning, no true end. We use fiscal years, quarters, reporting periods — but those are conventions we impose on something that is, by nature, a continuous timeline. The trial balance and the Profit & Loss statement are snapshots. Photographs of a moment. Not a finish line. Just part of a process that keeps going after we close the books.
That changed how I think about outputs.
We’re obsessed with the final output. We want to hit EUR 3 million in revenue, get the body we imagined, publish the book, get the recognition. And we treat that destination as if it were the answer — as if reaching it would finally resolve something.
It doesn’t.
The output is always a snapshot. It’s what happened up to that point. It isn’t who you are. It doesn’t determine what comes next.
When we’re too focused on an output, we fall into a trap: we start seeing the world through that output. And that creates blind spots. Obsessiveness shrinks the spectrum. We stop seeing the process, stop seeing the wider picture, stop asking the right questions — because we’re only looking at that one number, that one metric, that one milestone.
I work with companies trying to reach a certain revenue target. And there’s always a moment where the intention becomes a cage.
“Last year we did a million. This year we want to grow 15%.”
Sounds reasonable. But what we’re actually doing is trying to control the output. And trying to control the output is, in practice, anxiety dressed up as strategy. We’re looking at the output from a place of scarcity — as if the number might slip away, as if we need to hold it down.
When the intention is met, we stop. We get tired. Sometimes we leave. When it isn’t met, we turn it into a minimum bar for self-worth. Either way, the output has become bigger than the process. And that makes everything smaller.
This post is being written now. Two or three years after the last one I published.
The other day I went back and read those old posts. And I didn’t recognise myself in any of them. I felt discomfort, some embarrassment — that strange feeling of looking at something you made and thinking “who is this person?”
For a moment, I read that as failure. As if I’d failed to be consistent, to maintain a clear line, to produce something lasting.
But that’s not it.
What happened is that those posts were outputs. Snapshots of what I thought, what I knew, what I was at that moment. And I evolved. The discomfort isn’t a sign of failure — it’s a sign that something moved. That the timeline kept going.
If I had treated those posts as the definitive version of me, I’d have stayed stuck. Fortunately, I didn’t. Fortunately, the output was not the output.
There’s enormous freedom in accepting this.
If the output doesn’t define you — if you’re not the number, not the post, not the company you built — then the possibility has no ceiling. You can be wrong without the mistake being a verdict. You can reach an intention without that being the end of something. You can publish this text today knowing that in two years you’ll look at it differently — and that’s not a problem. That’s exactly the point.
The output is just a spark. A fragment. A record of a moment in a process that has no end.
Accounting knew this all along.
The output is not the output. It’s just what’s on the balance sheet today.