 Whenever learning a new topic, the first question that comes to mind is why? Why learn tax preparation? Why learn tax law? And the response which gushes out of every American heart, every American soul is to save money from the dumpster fire that is government spending, pulling her into the promised land of the private sector where she can grow, where she can flourish rather than being burnt as a sacrificial offering to the gods of big government boondoggles. All right, I might've got a little bit dramatic there, but that's probably the first thing that comes to mind, saving some money. Our next objective, to be in compliance with the law. When we're talking about tax law, that of course means paying the taxes that were legally required to pay and being in compliance with filing requirements were legally required to do. You might think that these first two objectives are contradictory to each other, but they're not really because our objective in tax preparation will often be to pay the least amount of taxes that we are legally required to pay. Because of the complexity of the income tax system, it's quite easy to accidentally pay more taxes than you're legally required to pay, which means that you've sacrificed more of that money to the dumpster fire of government spending and government boondoggles. And is it likely that you're gonna be getting that money back? Probably not. So our objective is to get it right the first time. Now you might argue about whether or not you agree with particular tax laws, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a second, but if you know the tax system and you know the tax law and tax preparation, you'll be better informed to have discussions with people about what the best kind of tax system would be and the rationale for it, and you can make those types of arguments once again within the compliance of the law. You might also be learning taxes because you wanna be in business doing tax preparation in some way, shape, or form. If that is the case, then I would think that you would want to narrow down your focus to think about what that exactly looks like. Oftentimes I find that when we think about goals, we have a very broad type of idea of the goal, which we really need to narrow down into particular steps so that we can go onto an objective that we can actually achieve. So for example, are we thinking about doing tax preparation at another firm, or are we thinking about having our own business where we can do tax preparation? Is there an area that we can specialize in? Taxation itself is huge, so generally you're gonna want some kind of specialization. You might specialize, for example, in lower income tax returns, in which case the business model will typically be, you're gonna be charging less for the preparation, but you're gonna be doing a lot more of them, so you're gonna make less money per return, but you're gonna have to do more returns in that case, or you do tax preparation for larger or more wealthy individuals. In that instance, then they have more complex returns generally, you're gonna make more per return and possibly do more work in planning and tax preparation as well as tax planning type of services in that instance. You can also specialize in certain areas. Do you wanna specialize in, for example, one location where you don't have a bunch of different state tax returns or possibly you wanna specialize where you have multiple state tax returns and possibly income in different areas for an income are different types of areas you can specialize. You also might be more interested on the business side of things versus the personal side of things, doing business tax returns, tax returns that have a schedule C for sole proprietorship or an S corporation flow through entities, let it an LLC or corporate type return, partnership type of returns. Oftentimes people with accounting backgrounds like myself tend to enjoy that side of things because you get to use more of that, you know, the double entry accounting system. So in any case, highly recommend that if you're looking to start working in some area of taxation that you start breaking down the goals to particular steps. And I think that'll make it easier to move forward.