Russ Lowry delivers a short, practical career-advice talk urging continuous self-education: "leaders are readers." He recommends studying your craft and reading/listening beyond your profession (books, audiobooks, podcasts), seeking mentorship (take successful peers to lunch), and learning business skills if self-employed. He emphasizes adapting to change and mastering emerging technologies (AI) to stay competitive in 2025.
Here's a little tip for as you start your careers, so many people like to say, bemoan their station, bitch about their life and how bad it is. Usually it's due to their own bad choices and poor choices. But one thing you can do to help yourself in your careers, I used to tell this, the older boys and I drop them off. But leaders are readers and readers are leaders. Study your craft, study what you do. Read outside your profession. You never know. A lot of I study a lot of things that are outside insurance because some of your greatest gains will come from looking at things outside the norms of your industry. So if you guys hopefully all either own your own business or maybe a side hustle, like finally with baseball camps and coaching in the summer and giving lessons, there's the guineas going off. Think about that. You know, don't just sit and watch TV at night, read books, listen to audiobooks in your car. If you spend a lot of time in your car, going between appointments or going to work or whatever. When I work on the in the yard, listen to audiobooks, listen to podcasts, study your craft, study things. Don't just come home in jail. Sometimes there's time for that, but you don't the way you would. You get better in your job and get promotions, going back to school, getting designations, but also, you know, learning more things that you can do, especially being self employed. Sometimes you're a really good H vac guy like me, Jack is. But running a business is a hell of a lot different from being able to fix an air conditioner. It's a whole different set of skills. So those will be things you'll have to study and learn all the your own. Sometimes it's learning through hard knocks, but I prefer to stand on the shoulders of giants, look and see what people ahead of me have done and learn from that. Or like I used to take when I was growing my agency, I would pick the agent I wanted to beat that was beating me in production and sales, the decent guys. If you ask them to lunch or dinner or whatever, they'll do that. So I'd say I would take them out to lunch, ask them what they would do if they were me, what they would do to start over. And it's amazing what people will tell you. Successful people want other people to be successful. So I got a lot of good advice and information. Same thing when I started in rental property. I took a bunch of my clients out that did that. So always study your craft, always look for the next step and be open to learning because to me, in sales and business, a lot of things, it's a grow or die. You have to get better. And here in 2025, AI is just getting started as we go. In the future, you're going to have to get ahead of that and master that to succeed anywhere.
