Recipe for Success – Hard Work and Humility

Life insurance industry doyen, Russell Collins, has recently celebrated 50 years at the Elite member level within the Million Dollar Round Table organisation.

This is a rare and outstanding achievement for a life insurance advice practitioner who has continually sought to achieve high personal standards of performance, and in doing so, has set a series of benchmarks for those who follow.

In speaking with Collins about his career journey, and in Riskinfo’s own observation of his conduct over the last 15 years, two personal attributes have stood out which appear to have underpinned the basis for his career longevity and for his success…

Hard work

Collins related an anecdote which exemplifies his attitude towards doing what it takes to achieve a goal. This story relates not to his advice career but to his years as a teenager who loved to play basketball.

As a growing 14 year-old, Collins aspired to be the best basketballer he could, but lacked the important capacity to leap vertically to any great degree. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Collins researched how he could be better, and wrote a letter (this was in the 1950s) to a renowned American basketball coach to seek his advice.

Collins received the advice and worked on exercises – every day – that would improve his technique and increase his vertical leap.

Needless to say, Collins did improve, and to the extent that he was eventually recruited to play with one of the best basketball clubs in New South Wales.

The message in this personal story from Collin’s youth is that there are no short cuts when it comes to achieving most goals. Hard work and dedication to the task can achieve great outcomes, and this attribute exists within anyone – irrespective of their career choice – who has the drive and discipline needed to ‘do the hard yards’ that are often required to achieve a goal.

Humility

Many career professionals, including financial advisers, achieve significant success. Some of those who achieve this level can sometimes find it tempting to take the foot off the pedal and find comfort in an established routine and set of behaviours that deliver personal and business success.

The very best professionals, however, including financial advisers, are constantly seeking ways to improve themselves – both as business operators and as individuals. Collins fits comfortably into this mould.

Throughout his career, often by dint of his association with other high-achieving MDRT members, Collins has always sought advice and wisdom from others. He can reel off memories of many conversations he has shared with his peers, dating back to the early 1970s with US advisers who he says were years ahead of Australian advisers in terms of their approach and their thoughts and ideas around how they could best serve the interests of their clients. This is where Collins first came across the concepts of advice areas including estate planning and business insurance.

Across his fifty years in the Elite MDRT member category – and even before then – Collins never assumed that he knew everything or that he didn’t need to learn anything new. Quite the opposite. According to Collins, it has only been by listening, by learning and – equally importantly – by sharing, that he has achieved the heights of the business success has has experienced.

Collins possesses other attributes that have served him well in his life insurance advice journey, including the fact that he is highly intelligent and has a strong passion for and belief in what he does. He also holds a genuine empathy for those fortunate members of the Australian community who are or have been his clients over the last 50-plus years.

Underlying these other personal traits, however, are the two key ingredients in his story of success – as observed by Riskinfo – that are within the capacity of all advice professionals to draw on, if it matters to them enough: hard work and humility.