I’m going to propose that you develop an uncanny ability to be selectively ignorant. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.
Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input.
Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.
We’re launching Cocentives, a commission management system for insurance agencies.
Insurance agencies grind through commission statements from carriers every month. These statements arrive in different formats - Excel files, CSVs, PDFs - with different structures, different column names, different ways of identifying agents. Today, a leader or accountant at the agency has to turn all of this into usable numbers: how much each agent earned, from which carriers, for which policies.
This work takes hours per month at a mid-sized agency and does not scale very well. It’s manual, repetitive, and error-prone. It’s tiring work. Most agencies use spreadsheets. The person who maintains the spreadsheets becomes a single point of failure.
Cocentives replaces this process with an entirely new flow. As files arrive, forward them to Cocentives from your inbox, or upload them in the dashboard. From here, the files get analyzed and read deeply. Cocentives works through your files for you. It extracts the data cleanly, matches your agents across documents and history, calculates the totals, and produces the statements. All you have to do is review and send to your team.
Cocentives uses an advanced multi-analyst architecture to process and work with data. When you upload files, analyzing agents run in parallel to parse different formats simultaneously, extract structured data, and reconcile it against what the system already knows about your agency.
There are no templates to configure. Cocentives talks with you to infer structure from your data and documents themselves. When Co encounters anything ambiguous - an agent name it hasn’t seen before, a commission rate that doesn’t match historical patterns - it asks. Your answer teaches the system and cascades the changes for you. Next time, it won’t need to ask.
Each agency builds up what we call an organizational memory: the carriers you work with, your agent roster, your split structures, your exceptions and bonuses. After processing a few months of statements, the system knows your commission logic well enough to handle new files with less and less intervention.
You interact with Cocentives through conversation or the simple interface options. You can type natural language requests:
“Create a report with the files I sent you for February”
“Open last month’s report”
“Show me the breakdown for agent Mike Torres”
The system interprets these requests and makes action happen for you - opening panels, starting processing runs, surfacing specific data. This is not a chatbot bolted onto a traditional interface. The conversation is the primary way you navigate and control the application. From the ground up, Cocentives is built to be intelligent and fast. Instantly you will notice it is unlike any other software you have used for your agency.
There’s also a standard UI for reviewing results, approving statements, and sending reports to agents. Agents receive their statements via email with a link to an interactive portal where they can view their earnings and ask questions about specific line items.
Cocentives looks simple on the surface. But our simple interface hides a sophisticated and advanced system. We did this on purpose. We want to hide the complexity and only disturb you with the essentials. Cocentives does the rest.
If you want to maximize your agency performance, then Cocentives is perfect for you. Our software is improved every day to support your work. Go to cocentives . com for more.
Suppose that you are given a problem to solve, I don’t care what kind of a problem – a machine to design, or a physical theory to develop, or a mathematical theorem to prove, or something of that kind – probably a very powerful approach to this is to attempt to eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials; that is, cut it down to size. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution.
Now, in so doing, you may have stripped away the problem that you’re after. You may have simplified it to a point that it doesn’t even resemble the problem that you started with; but very often if you can solve this simple problem, you can add refinements to the solution of this until you get back to the solution of the one you started with.
In many ways finding the thing that is hard to do but helpful to others is the closest you can be to living. All the other things, actions, and habits that goes along the way scales way down in comparison to this. Accepting the hard thing you are given, and then getting through it, day in and day out. That is living.
In many ways finding the thing that is hard to do but helpful to others is the closest you can be to living. All the other things, actions, and habits that goes along the way scales way down in comparison to this. Accepting the hard thing you are given, and then getting through it, day in and day out. That is living.
A simple example where you want to factor in a large margin of safety is a bridge. David Dodd, a longtime colleague of Benjamin Graham, observed “You build a bridge that 30,000-pound trucks can go across and then you drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. That is the way I like to go across bridges.”
“The reliability that matters is not the simple reliability of one component of a system, but the final reliability of the total control system.” — Garrett Hardin