Do You Have The Drive To Succeed?

Let me be blunt with you for a minute.

You tell your kids to show up every day. You push them to put in the work when no one’s watching if they want to improve in their sport. But here’s the tough question: Are you following that same advice in your insurance career?

I wasn’t. For 13 years, I coasted. I was mediocre at best, and I knew it. Despite understanding what success required from my baseball career – the dedication, the practice, the constant improvement – I didn’t apply any of that to insurance. Instead, I made excuses. I complained about my territory. I expected leads to be handed to me. I waited for my boss to do the heavy lifting.

Sound familiar?

It wasn’t until 2014, when my wife Amy and I made the bold decision to leave Wisconsin and move to Colorado, that reality hit me hard. I had to get my act together if I wanted to succeed in this industry. I faced some tough conversations with myself about whether I even wanted to continue in insurance.

But here’s what I realized: No one else was going to invest the time and money in my success. It was all on me.

So I made my first real investment in myself – a productivity course by Darren Hardy. Did I have the $997 to spare? Absolutely not. In fact, here’s something I rarely share: I had just lost $40,000 on my condo sale and had to bring $30,000 to the closing table.

But I knew I needed to bet on myself.

That course changed everything about how I managed my time and focused on priorities that actually moved the needle.

In 2015, I made another investment – this time in learning. I started an email newsletter with just 30 prospects (who hadn’t even asked to be on my list). I spent hundreds of hours learning how to write compelling emails that delivered real value. I studied how to craft messages that would make prospects want to book appointments.

The results? From those initial 30 contacts, which grew to about 100, I wrote $180,000 in business that year from just three prospects who responded to that newsletter.

But here’s the key – I didn’t go looking for some magic bullet script that other agents were using. I put in the work to get better at the craft myself.

How badly do you want success this year? Are you willing to invest in yourself when it’s uncomfortable? Are you ready to put in the hours when no one’s watching?

Because the truth is, success in insurance isn’t about finding shortcuts. It’s about making the same commitment to excellence that you preach to your kids. It’s about betting on yourself, even when the odds seem stacked against you.

The choice is yours. You can keep coasting, or you can decide that this is the year you finally put in the work to match your potential.

What’s it going to be?