Description: In “Gearing up for Designing Your Future,” published in the May 2017 issue of Actuary of the Future, the author cited four heroes as his personal inspiration. This article is the successor, showing the glory of these heroes and how they can inspire us actuaries today, as we strive to live our best lives. Identifying your own Noble Purpose as an actuary and in your life makes creating a five-year plan for personal growth meaningful and motivating. What will you gain from reading biographies of famous people and the classics? To aspire, to approach eloquence, to emulate the poetry of how they put their ideas across to mobilize their publics, to elevate our own characters by their examples, to be fully equipped to make moral and ethical judgments, to master the primary tool, verbal communication.

Description: As part of the 2019 Disruptions to the Actuarial Profession Contest, this essay posits that the actuarial profession should respond to other fields encroaching on its space, particularly software development and data science, not by a defensive reaction to establish a boundary between fields but instead by a welcoming attitude that seeks to utilize expertise from other fields while maintaining the actuarial role of comprehensive risk management and its hard-earned professional trust.