Excerpt from WHOLE LIFE

EXCERPT from the book:
WHOLE LIFE: Looking Back While Looking Ahead
DavidDouglasFord.com
All Rights Reserved.

Excerpt from Chapter I - A BRIEF HISTORY

I have a theory. Actually, I have two theories. One theory is that only extraordinarily weird people would be drawn to becoming life insurance actuaries because talking about number laws, death rate averages, how many females die at age forty-three, and other similar matters are indeed subjects capable of being attractive only to those among us who have already been made irredeemably odd by unusual occurrences in life that I can only guess about. But my second theory is that normal and reasonably well-adjusted young people go into actuarial science and are somehow genetically altered such that their personalities are far from the middle of the bell curve of reasonable human behavior. Remember that movie (and a remake or two) where the pods grew into duplications of people, and then took over for those people? And remember how you could always tell who the pod people were because they talked in an odd and mechanical way, and used expressions that no one else completely understood? Actuaries are sort of like that. No, actuaries are EXACTLY like that. And I think I just came up with a third theory that makes the most sense – actuaries are pod people from another planet. I’m guessing it is a cold and dark planet where strange things grow up steep mountain walls and the inhabitants worship the “number god” and are obsessed with figuring out how many of them will still be there in five years’ time. So, based on my latest theory, I have a new rule for all home offices and it is effective immediately and without exception: None of the younger actuaries are allowed to have plants of any kind growing in their offices.

One night, an actuary came to our house for dinner back when I was still in high school. My father was in the life insurance business before me as was his father before him. Life insurance is a genetic defect in the Ford family. That doesn’t begin to explain my father’s dangerous and cavalier action of actually bringing an actuary into our otherwise safe and secure surroundings, but maybe he had no other choice. I prefer to believe this myself, since my father otherwise always showed the very best judgment in familial matters.

This actuary friend of my father was staying near our home in Southern California for a company function of some sort, or an actuarial convention, or a weird persons gathering. I have not forgotten the experience of his visit all these years later. For one thing, he showed up with a briefcase and never let it out of his sight. I learned later that whenever he traveled, all that he brought with him was in that one big briefcase. It represented all of his airline baggage! And it was said to hold only twenty packs of cigarettes, two changes of underwear, and five dice (I personally can only testify as to the dice).

After dinner, he proceeded to show my family a game called “Petals Around the Rose.” It was not really a game so much as his tossing the dice and majestically announcing “the count is five” or whatever the count was. And then tossing them again and reporting the count for those numbers coming up on the five dice. It was fun in an unusual sort of way I suppose, and the trick was that you never tell the people the rhyme or reason for the “count,” but only that they were expected to pick up on the methodology at some point. It still seems an odd way to end an evening with perfect strangers you have only just met and who cannot imagine why you are there eating dinner at their family table in the first place. Oh, and he wore his watch over the cuff of his shirt. I had never seen that before. I haven’t since! It all seemed very weird to me at the time and it still does. Of course, having gone into the insurance business myself, I have had the opportunity to meet many more actuaries since then, and a number of those mathematical wizards are good friends of mine. And, yes, they are a little weird, but then so am I. Perhaps there isn’t anything so wrong with that.

So, what is an engaging fellow like me doing in the life insurance selling business? Well, it really is a complicated answer. And it involves the answer to whether I really am engaging, as I so firmly believe. And whether all life insurance salespeople are really engaging, as I profess to be the case. Or whether we all are just hopelessly annoying, as others seem convinced. And mostly it involves what being in the life insurance selling business really means for the future of life as we know it.

However, be not troubled. Complicated answers can be the very best kind.

And we have a whole book to work together on it.

For now, let’s take a coffee break and check our email.