We’ve been urging CPAs to get ahead of the curve for years now, and with good reason. Given the pace of change today, if you’re not ahead of the curve, you’re woefully behind.

Here’s the problem with being an early adopter, though: Few people initially come along for the ride. In fact, more people take shots at you at first than cheer you on.

It’s hard to be hanging out in a place like that.

“What’s the best way to fight that?” legendary New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady asked Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “There’s only one fight I can win, and that is how well I play. Why let anything get in the way of that?”

In other words, who cares what anyone else thinks? Keep doing what you do, and do it well. If you do it well enough — if you win five Super Bowls, for instance — people will stop talking crap about you.

Keep blazing new trails, folks.

“Do not go where the path may lead,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. “Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Want to know what happens when you do that? Eventually, others follow.

That makes you a leader … and, eventually, a legend.

Keep working harder than the other guy. Keep doing things no one else is doing. Stay a step ahead.

Be Tom Brady.