You are reading a page from Life Insurance as a Life Work, by Hugh Hart
(1926)
Part of the American Term Life Insurance History Project
Term Life Insurance
CHAPTER IX
/ BY-PRODUCTS
Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable
consciousness.—SAMUEL JOHNSON.
A large part of the net profit earned by
some of this country's largest manufactur-
ing corporations comes through the careful
use of by-products. In some industries the
by-products have become as important as
the chief articles of manufacture.
In a sense the same is true of life under-
writing. There are by-products -which, in
the individual case, may be fully as im-
portant as the main opportunities which
this work offers. The permanency of occu-
pation, for example, or the healthful out-of-
doors work may mean more in the long run
than immediate financial opportunities.
The successful life insurance salesman
need have no fear for his job. There is al-
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BY-PRODUCTS
ways a place for a life insurance producer.
The success of the institution of life insur-
ance is due to the agents in the field, who
secure the company's business. No one
knows this better than do the men in control
of the various companies. One life insur-
ance magazine recently contained one hun-
dred twenty-eight advertisements inserted
by good companies which wished more rep-
resentatives. This statement does not im-
ply that the mere fact that a man has
entered life insurance work guarantees him
permanence, whether he makes good or not.
You must make good in life insurance, as in
every other endeavor in life. The drone,
the ne'er-do-well, the obstructionist, the dis-
organizer, the constitutional failure, as well
as the misfit—these have no place in the life
insurance business; but the assurance of a
lifetime connection is the heritage of those
who make good. Even when old age comes,
it is possible to continue this work. In-
numerable instances might be cited of men
in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties,
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LIFE INSURANCE AS A LIFE WORK
who continue to serve in the ranks of life
insurance producers.
If assured permanence is a valuable by-
product of the life insurance business, then
of equal importance is the relationship of
this vocation to health. Perhaps the most
potent cause of ill health in connection with
work, is worry. Worry is largely caused
hy the burden of great responsibility. The
merchant with a large stock of goods on
hand, subject to declining prices and chang-
ing styles, the banker with his mind trou-
bled by loans he is unable to collect, the
farmer with his crops subjected to untoward
weather or destructive insects—responsibil-
ities such as these wear down vitality and
bring men to their graves before their time.
The absence of a capital investment of any
consequence leaves the life insurance man
comparatively care free. He has his share
of worries, it is true; but they are not the
kind that must be borne by those who have
large sums of money invested in their busi-
ness, subjected to innumerable hazards.
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BY-PRODUCTS
A second cause of ill health in connection
with work is too close indoor confinement.
Nature evidently intended man to spend a
large part of his time in the open air.
Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral, London,
in arguing that the race was going back-
ward physically, stated that the two finest
physical specimens he had ever looked upon
were Zulu savages—men who lived in the
open. Anyone who has ever seen full-
blooded American Indians will testify to a
similar physical state. Many a man, given
up for a physical wreck, has changed from
an indoor to an outdoor vocation, and has
had his old vitality come back.
The comparative freedom from worry,
the outdoor work with plenty of air and ex-
ercise which characterize the life insurance
business, make it one of the most healthful
of all the vocations. It draws heavily upon
the nervous system, it is true, and one who
comes under the spell of its fascination is
quite likely to overdo. Yet experience has
demonstrated that those in the life insur-
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LIFE INSURANCE AS A LIFE WORK
ance vocation whose health has failed be-
cause of the nature of the work are so few
and far between as to constitute the excep-
tions which prove the rule that the health-
fulness of the occupation is an important by-
product of life insurance selling.
The life insurance agent can spend far
more time with his family than most men
who choose selling as an occupation. Those
who have been engaged in traveling jobs
of various kinds, will appreciate this by-
product. Life at best is short, and the time
we are permitted to spend with our loved
ones is all too brief under the most favorable
conditions. When a man's work habitually
takes him away from his family, he and
they endure a hardship. Nor is it' a mor-
ally healthful condition for children to be
brought up without the daily oversight of
the father of the house. It is the exception,
rather than the usual case, for the average
life insurance salesman to have to be away
from home frequently.
While it is not literally true that one ter-
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BY-PRODUCTS
ritory is as good as another, it is amazing
how much life insurance may be written in
the most unpromising places, provided the
territory is thoroughly combed for business.
I know one intensive worker who wrote a
million dollars of life insurance during a
period of three years in two villages, one of
them some distance from the railroad, the
combined population of which was less than
one thousand people. Although ten years
have elapsed since he started work in those
villages, he has continued to go back every
year and has never yet failed to write a sub-
stantial volume of business on each return
trip.
Even in great centers like New York or
Chicago, the actual territory worked by the
average successful life underwriter is small.
One large producer in New York confines
his operations to the territory within a
few blocks of his office, and even when
favorable "leads" fall into his hands which
would take him to other parts of the city, he
steadfastly refuses to leave his territory.
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LIFE INSURANCE AS A LIFE WORK
Years ago another life underwriter marked
out for himself a few blocks in the neighbor-
hood of Fulton Street, and finds more than
he can do in that vicinity. Barring unusual
circumstances, there is no need for any life
underwriter to become a "rolling stone."
The privilege of working near his home, and
of being at home with his family, is a not to
be decried by-product of the life insurance
vocation.
The opportunity for self-improvement is
another by-product. The ever-increasing
requirements of training, necessitated both
by competition and by the practise of com-
panies and agencies, are in themselves a
means of self-improvement. Life insur-
ance is no simple system, and neither is
salesmanship; the mastery of these two
important subjects gives poise and self-
confidence to a man. The life underwriter
also has the daily opportunity of meeting
men, and of sharpening his wits against
theirs. Just as unused muscles degenerate,
so minds kept cloistered from contact with
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BY-PRODUCTS
other minds may grow dull. The mind to
mind encounter every hour, which is the
daily routine of the busy ambassador of life
insurance, gives him a keenness of percep-
tion, and a resourceful capacity to take care
of himself in any intellectual emergency.
Also, these frequent brain collisions set
latent thought currents in motion, stimulate
imagination, and cultivate a concise, logical,
and forceful manner of thought and speech.
The poet Pope said that "the proper
study of mankind is man"; it is also the
most profitable study. The knowledge of
human nature gained by studying our fel-
lows strengthens us for each and every
problem of life; for by knowing others we
come to know ourselves, and self-knowledge
must always precede self-improvement.
Every hard-fought sale you make is a vic-
tory won over your prospect, and every
hard-fought interview in which you fail to
make a sale, is a victory over yourself; for
one gives you the confidence that is born of
triumph, the other the strength which al-
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LIFE INSURANCE AS A LIFE WORK
ways comes with the consciousness of a well-
fought battle. The very effort to master an-
other man^s mind, to subdue his will, to con-
vince his moral nature of his binding obliga-
tion, is strength-begetting. That volatile
something which we call personality becomes
more compelling through these contacts.
The writer recently observed a successful
life insurance salesman of many years ex-
perience, sitting quietly in a conference with
a dozen other men during the discussion of
an important matter. Although he was not
the chairman of the meeting, each of the
speakers turned and addressed the greater
portion of their remarks to him. Instinc-
tively they recognized his power. Long
years of mastering men in life insurance in-
terviews had improved his original cast of
mind and soul and personality, until, even
as he sat in silence, he dominated the group.
The development of initiative, too, fol-
lows as a part of the normal development of
the underwriter. The absence of a boss to
lay out his work for him, necessitates the
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BY-PRODUCTS
creation of tasks by himself for himself.
It is one thing to lay out work for another,
which we might not do ourselves; that re-
quires only a part measure of initiative.
But to plan a series of tasks, then to set out
to do them as planned, requires the highest
type of initiative. Initiative is a distinc-
tive characteristic of the native American.
It is the quality, which, above all others, has
caused our country to forge ahead of other
countries. Through life insurance selling
this quality is developed, perhaps, in larger
degree than through any other vocation.
Another source of self-improvement is the
get-together custom which characterizes
American life insurance practise. Agency
meetings, life insurance conventions, asso-
ciation meetings, insurance banquets—these
are some of the means by which each life
insurance salesman comes in contact with
the best minds both from the field and the
home office. Through these meetings he
gathers knowledge and inspiration—the
hand-maidens of progress and growth.
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LIFE INSURANCE AS A LIFE WORK
As we have already endeavored to show,
life -underwriting offers such unlimited op-
portunities that there may be little tempta-
tion to depart from the process of personal
selling. At the same time it is logical to
mention, as a by-product, the fact that envi-
able executive positions are open to those
who first make a success of personal selling.
First, there are opportunities to become
general agents, or agency managers, in
which positions you are required to secure
and train other men to do what you have
demonstrated you can do. Many able per-
sonal producers of life insurance find them-
selves ill-fitted by temperament to run an
agency, and some prefer to take on no duties
or responsibilities that will interfere with
their personal production. Practically all
general agents and managers are recruited
from among the personal producers, how-
ever, and anyone aspiring to the position of
general agent or agency manager must
approach that opportunity through the ave-
nue of personal selling. Obviously, it
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BY-PRODUCTS
would be quite incongruous to try to teach
other men to sell when you have never done
so yourself.
The opportunity of becoming an official
of one of the life insurance companies also,
in many cases, awaits the man who has made
an outstanding success in the field. The
presidents of some of our thriving life in-
surance companies, came to their high posts
through service in the field with a rate book,
and innumerable vice-presidents, agency
superintendents, and other executives of
American life insurance institutions are ex-
producers. In fact, there is a growing feel-
ing on the part of the whole insurance
fraternity, both officers and field men, that,
in future, the officers of our companies must
have a more intimate knowledge of, and
sympathy with, the work of the men who
obtain the business of the company. In the
future, this sentiment will inevitably result
in the selection of an even greater propor-
tion of company officers from among the
agents than is the case at the present time.
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