From insurance claims to federal programs

An unlikely throughline.

My career started in insurance claims and wound its way into federal disaster programs. People assume that is a hard left turn, a complete reinvention. Looking back, I think it was the straightest line I could have walked, I just could not see it at the time.

Claims work, at its core, is helping a person through a bad day with fairness and follow-through. Someone’s car is wrecked, their basement is flooded, their plans are upended, and your job is to be competent and humane in the exact moment they need both. Strip away the industry and that is the skill.

Disaster recovery is the same instinct at a different scale. The car becomes a county. The policyholder becomes a community. The stakes go up and the systems get more complex, but the fundamental act, helping people through the worst version of their day with competence and care, did not change at all.

I am wary of how casually we tell people to discount their early jobs as mere stepping stones to be escaped. The fundamentals you build in those roles, the ones that feel beneath your ambitions at twenty-five, tend to be exactly the ones that carry you decades later. I learned to handle a worried person on the phone long before I learned anything about federal grants.

So if your own path looks like a series of unrelated jumps, look again for the throughline. It is usually there, hiding in the verbs rather than the nouns. The industries change. What you are actually good at, and what you actually care about, tends to be remarkably consistent across all of it.