The Ordinary is Death to the Insurance Broker

With ordinariness, on the other hand, insurance becomes like the nasty forms for the insurance you get when you rent a car. Something you are too busy to understand properly, which is too complicated for you to work out, and for which you routinely pay too much - and then feel resentful of.

As an insurance broker you can cope with almost anything - to paraphrase a famous writer: dinginess is death - you can cope with discomfort, rejection, poverty, trauma, and drama. All these don't matter a bit. In fact most good insurance brokers have seen plenty of each and have only been encouraged, in a way, by all of them. But the ordinary, the mean, small confines of what people expect, make good insurance advice impossible.

You see, insurance is connected by a golden thread to all that is worthwhile in life. The thread is risk. Here's a greater mind than mine on the subject: "It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home." Theodore Roosevelt said that. I puzzled for a little while that a man who accomplished so much should talk about how the great prizes are those connected with the home. But they are. Spouse, children, hobbies, and the things that you care about most. Work, is for those things - or it's a craft that is as much a part of you as your interests and skills are. Insurance is about protecting this fragile organism - your home life - from all the troubles of the wider world.

By doing that it confers great freedom on a person. A wealthy person can choose to take on risks because the amount at stake is a small proportion of their total. The vast majority of people cannot do the same. That's why insurance is the friend of the worker, giving independence and freedom for those that want to have a go at life.