Here’s Why Insurance is Exciting
And why you’ll probably read about something AI-related instead
By Valkyrie Holmes
It’s been a while since I’ve written a thought piece besides a birthday article or the occasional 30-day challenge reflection, but I wanted to start things back up again and start with this: congratulations! You made it past the title, which I’m sure 98% of people skipped out on because they really don’t believe it. They really don’t think insurance can be exciting. And guess what?
Neither do you…for the most part.
I guarantee that there will be some insurance professionals reading this (and thank you for that) who understand what I mean, and I’ll get into that in a second. But for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Valkyrie and I run an insurtech company called Faura. We use climate and property analytics to help insurance companies and homeowners reduce their natural disaster risk, and believe it or not, I was not born into a family of insurance folks or studied in college to become an underwriter or got lost in the woods and stumbled upon a pack of wolves and raised as one of their own, only to howl, “loss ratio” and “risk management” at the moon—none of that.
In fact, the majority of insurance professionals don’t go to college for insurance. They kinda just…fall into it.
I’d say 9/10 experts I talk to say the same things,
“I never thought I’d be in the insurance space but out of college, I got an internship/opportunity and I’ve been in the space ever since!”
It’s actually pretty shocking how many people I’ve heard that from, and I started to ask myself the question of why?
Why do so many people just “fall” into insurance?
And that’s where we get to the title: because insurance is exciting.
Still don’t believe me?
Well think about this — we couldn’t own cars and have the money for payouts if we didn’t have insurance. By the same token, we couldn’t take time off of work in the event of an injury or ensure that our family is taken care of it wasn’t for insurance. We couldn’t protect our homes in the case of a natural disaster if we didn’t have insurance. We couldn’t pay for life-saving surgeries without insurance. And why? Because insurance is literally the ultimate safety net, and it does a lot for us.
When you think about it, insurance touches everything we think about or do. When we just stop to think about buying insurance along with a house and a car, for the majority of people, those items are their most valued assets. And because of these companies, we’re able to protect them and the money we pour into them with relative ease. Now let’s just stop thinking about the big things and think about the even bigger things: businesses.
Businesses couldn’t thrive and grow without insurance. I guarantee your favorite fast food joint, beauty salon, or groovy dance club has insurance, and why? Because when they’re not worrying about losing their business if a storm hits, they can focus on making it better for you. Businesses need to be able to protect themselves and so do you because life gets out of control sometimes. That’s why it exists: because life gets out of control.
And that started to answer my question: why do people fall into insurance? Because insurance is everywhere and in everything. I’ve heard of people coming out of law school and working with carriers, data scientists working for large underwriting teams and falling in love with it, and so many more examples of the fact that insurance is underwriting our entire lives. Some can see that as scary, but others can look at that and see that insurance could be, dare I say, exciting!
I forget who once told me this, but I’ve now adopted the saying that insurance is one of the most calculated and data-driven industries in the world, and that’s what makes it fun. Because it underpins everything we do, that means we need a lot of data to make those decisions and make things happen. Because we need to make so many decisions in so many industries, it helps to have people who originated in all kinds of industries to help make that happen. And BOOM! That’s how they get ‘cha.
Because it applies to every industry, it attracts from every industry and I mean EVERY industry. I urge you to try to come up with one industry where insurance doesn’t apply (leave it in the comments). But because it applies to everything and it’s all around us, you don’t think about it.
Insurance is an industry that enwraps society but because of that, we’ve become numb to it and that’s why people think it’s boring. That’s why those 98% of people decided to read about something AI-related instead. Because legacy industries that society was built on just aren’t sexy anymore, and we take them for granted.
Paying into insurance allows us to have the things we want without worrying about whether they’ll be gone the next day. Insurance gives us the piece of mind that our loved ones and family and friends will be okay; it allows us to focus on what’s really important and gives us more freedom to do the things we really want to do.
Insurance gets a bad wrap, believe me, I know, and I’m not saying there aren’t scummy insurers and underwriters out there, but the majority of people “fell” into insurance because they understand the simple fact that we wouldn’t be able to live our lives without it, and that’s what makes it exciting. To contribute to an industry that helps so many people pursue their passions and live their dreams, while also protecting people and helping them get back on their feet, that’s what’s rewarding.
check out what we do at faura here.
