An Opportunity to Make it Great

I’m glad its a new year. Of course, the changing of one year’s number to the next is an arbitrary convention, but somehow the simple act of turning of a page on a calendar is exciting; it represents a new beginning—one full of promise and hope. And after the devastating year that was 2001, the opportunity to close the calendar on the old year holds more significance than ever.

So far, I’ve spent the weekends of this new year at volleyball tournaments, watching my teenaged daughter and hundreds of others like her bumping, setting, spiking and playing their hearts out for hours at a time. (If we could harness the energy generated by 12 teams of 15-year old girls playing six simultaneous volleyball games in one arena, with just as many teams warming up on the sidelines, any worries about an energy crisis would be history.)

One thing that struck me while watching these young athletes is how they are able to view not only each game as a new opportunity, but each point as a new opportunity. No matter whether they are 10 points down or on a roll, they somehow have the ability to see each new play as what it is—a new play. And a game can, and frequently does, turn on that recognition. A girl that has been serving balls into the net all morning can let one fly strong and low, barely clearing the top of the net—an unreturnable serve—and suddenly it’s a new game.

Another thing I noticed is that while these young women fight with every ounce of energy they can muster to win, if they lose, most of the time they shake it off knowing there are going to be plenty more games to play and just as many opportunities to win.

I see the same kind of resilience and enthusiasm in the industry we cover. In much of my research I talk with insurance professionals about this kind of coverage or that, and I almost always ask about hardening markets, difficulties with renewals, prices going up. And in most lines it seems that prices are going up and coverage is getting harder to place.

But invariably the people I talk to say things like, “Sure, prices are rising, the market’s tougher, but its not impossible.” It’s not impossible to get a renewal, it’s not impossible to get that coverage, its not impossible to get that point, to win that game.

That’s not to say it’s not difficult. It has been and will continue to be very difficult.

But like Tom Hanks said to Geena Davis’s character in “A League of Their Own,”—the 1992 movie about the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League that thrived during World War II—responding to her complaint that life in baseball had gotten “too hard:” “If it was easy, everybody would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”