David Johnson is a third-generation life insurance salesman.

But that wasn't his first job.

The summer that I got my driver's license, I was making $4 an hour, picking up rocks in the sun at the country club across the street from our house.

And my dad said, why don't you come work at the office? I'll pay you 10 bucks an hour. And that sounded

like a way better opportunity than what I was doing. At first, he just answered the phone,

sort of the mail, did some filing. And then pretty quickly, within about a year, he had me

on the phones making telephone calls, setting appointments for other agents.

At that time, our group was endorsed by the Georgia Association of Realtors to sell disability insurance to real estate agents at a premium discount. And so you can buy a list of

anything. My dad bought a list of every real estate agent in the state of Georgia with their home

telephone number. And my job was to call 200 of them a day. Oh my. So you were cold calling?

I was cold calling. Yes. At age 1617.

1617.

I got my own little office and I had a phone and this stack of names and a ruler with a rubber

band wrapped around it and I just moved the ruler down the page.

There were about 50 names on a page and I could make about 50 calls in an hour. 50 calls. So what, like no one was

picking up the phone or what, how does that math work? There were a lot of messages. All there were

were home telephone numbers and so I was paid $5 an hour plus 10 cents a call plus $5 per appointment

that I set. My job was to make 200 calls in a day,

but every time I set an appointment, that would take 10 calls off the number of calls I had to make that day.

So for the $5 and the 10 call discount, I was highly motivated to set any appointment that I could.

I started working in the office the summer that I turned 16,

and I will be 50 here in a month.

...