Life is about choices

It’s been several years since I neither met nor spoke with my AIA insurance agent Josephine. I signed my first AIA insurance policy with her when I was working in Micropolis Limited Singapore. That was about 12 years ago. It was thus a surprise when she rang me up last week. We met up last Friday evening and chatted for hours till 10.30pm in the evening. She told me she left her AIA insurance agent job to start up her own consultancy and training business firm about 10 years ago. Nevertheless she continues to maintain her AIA insurance agent portfolio, a very smart and wise move on her part.

According to her it’s been really tough to start up and manage her own business firm. She has to work on most of the weekends to keep the business moving. Office politics were rampant and she has to deal with unreasonable and nasty relatives who were unfortunately also her business partners. Finally she had enough of it after struggling for over nine years and therefore decided to call it quit. She is still in the process of winding up her business and is now back to doing insurance agent job again. She told me she loss quite a lot of money when she winds up her consultancy and training business firm. She did not tell me how much she loss; I could sense from her expression the loss has been quite significant and considerable enough to perplex and impact her health. She suffered from high blood pressure for several months and her doctor has advised her to take things in stride. Don’t get me wrong though. Apart high blood pressure she seems to be in excellent health for a woman of her age. She has neither gain nor loses weight tremendously and I must compliment her for that despite her busy schedule.


Apart from the headache of having to face office politics, she also reckon that it is time for her to spend more time with her son whom she feels she has kind of neglected the pass 10 years due to her commitment to her business firm. Her son is now 14 years old and according to her a bit out of control. I told her she need not be too alarm since most kids of growing age tend to be more rebellious. Most kids in Singapore grow up after they complete their national service.

Josephine is an amazing woman to begin with. She possessed the kind of fighting spirit that most of us lack. Life is all about choices. Sometimes we make right choices and at times wrong choices in life. No one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. All of us have our ups and downs in life. We all learn from mistakes. What matter most is that we should persevere in times of difficulties in life. We ought to be willing to accept and acknowledge that some choices we make aren’t the best one in life and therefore we should quickly move on with life instead of clinging to some of the bad choices we made and regretting it but not doing anything about it.
Josephine demonstrated her ability and willingness to take up her old job, that of selling insurance policy. Apart from insurance policies, she also provides financial planning services. I could sense that she is not the kind of person that is into the get rich quick scheme type. She is willing to trade her time and efforts for long-term benefits in particular of that pertaining to customer loyalty.

We only live this once; surely any mistakes we made in life should not deter us from pursuing our goals and dreams. Do not let mistakes that we made to discourage us in life.
Pickup the broken the pieces and move on with life. After all, like I said, life is all about choices.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

Cheers
Richard