As a fellow actuary I followed the author on Survivor and of course I had to buy her book. I’m close to her age with similar experience but I still picked up some things that will be useful in my career.
This is not a typical business book and that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s a lot about connecting with people and it took me about 30 years to realize my job is as much about people as it is about numbers. I honestly believed that if I got the numbers right, the rest would come, but that only took me so far.
But enough about me. Here are a few things that stood out to me:
1. The elevator speech is something I learned about a few years ago but I am making an effort now to keep my headphones put away when I’m on the elevator. As the author says, you never know when this will lead to an opportunity.
2. The part about just being nice? Is it really that simple, and then I look around my office at the actuaries who have influence and, yep! It really is.
3. Maximize your opportunities. This is just something I never really thought about.
This book is full of things I learned the hard way and also full of things that made me stop and realize it was a new way of looking at an old problem. And that’s what actuaries do—we try to look at things from all the angles and figure out the probabilities of those things occurring.
If you read this book with an open mind I believe the probability that you will find some useful tidbit is close to 100%.