Do You Wear Jordans? How the Michael Jordan Mindset Sets the Standard for Insurance Excellence
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
There's a reason Michael Jordan became a cultural icon that transcends basketball and extends into business, branding, and performance psychology. It's not the rings. It's the standard. Jordan didn't ask what was good enough, he asked what was possible, and then he chased it relentlessly until possible became normal.
You probably own at least one pair of Jordans. Or you've thought about it. Or you know someone who has an entire collection. That brand carries weight because the man behind it carried weight, not just talent, but an obsessive, documented, sometimes uncomfortable standard of excellence that made everyone around him better whether they wanted to be or not.
The question for your agency isn't whether you admire that. Most people do. The question is whether you operate by it.
What the Jordan Standard Actually Means
People often summarize the Jordan standard as "work harder than everyone else." That's part of it, but it misses the specificity. Jordan didn't just put in more hours, he identified exactly what needed to be better, designed deliberate practice around that specific gap, and didn't move on until he'd closed it.
His footwork, his mid-range game, his defensive positioning, his mental preparation for big games, each of these was analyzed, isolated, and sharpened. He wasn't just training. He was diagnosing and correcting with precision.
For insurance agency owners, the parallel is direct. Working harder in general produces diminishing returns. Working with precision on your specific constraints, the conversion bottleneck, the retention gap, the referral process that was set up three years ago and never refined, that's the Jordan approach. You find the thing that's actually holding you back, and you get obsessive about fixing it until fixing it is no longer the constraint.
The Competitor Mentality That Nobody Talks About
One of the less comfortable parts of the Jordan story is how competitive he was about things that seemed petty from the outside. He kept score on everything. He remembered slights from years earlier. He used perceived disrespect as fuel.
That kind of extreme competitive fire isn't always healthy or appropriate, but there's a version of it that belongs in your agency: a genuine, personal unwillingness to be average. Not competitiveness toward your crosstown competitor, competitiveness toward your own past performance. The agency that closed 32% last quarter should be intolerable to you if you know 38% is possible. The retention rate that's industry average should feel like an insult if you know your process can do better.
Most agents are too comfortable with "pretty good." Pretty good is not the Jordan standard. Pretty good is what happens when you stop asking hard questions about what's actually possible.
Building a Culture Where Excellence Is the Floor
Jordan is also famous for making his teammates uncomfortable. He demanded of them the same standard he demanded of himself. Some of them thrived under it. Some didn't last. But the ones who stayed and competed at the level he required became legends in their own right. Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, the role players who won multiple championships because the environment demanded their best.
Your agency culture works the same way. When you hold a genuine excellence standard, not as a slogan, but as a lived reality, the people who belong in your agency rise to it. The people who don't will self-select out. That's not cruelty. That's clarity. You're doing everyone a favor by making the standard explicit and real rather than letting mediocrity become the ambient expectation.
The hard part is that the standard has to start with you. Jordan didn't ask his teammates to do things he wasn't willing to do first. If you want your team to be precise about follow-up, you have to be precise about follow-up. If you want them to study their metrics and identify their gaps, you have to be doing the same. Excellence cultures are grown from the top. They don't appear because you announce them.
What This Means for Your Agency
Identify the one performance metric in your agency that, if you fixed it, would matter the most. Not a general area, a specific number. Close rate on outbound calls. Retention on multi-line policies. Average premium per client. Whatever it is, get precise. Then do the Jordan thing: design deliberate work around closing that specific gap and don't move on until you've moved the needle.
That's it. That's the mindset. Precision, not just effort. Standards, not just intentions.
The Bottom Line
You can wear the Jordans. You can admire the career. But the real tribute to that standard of excellence is adopting it, in the specific, obsessive, detail-oriented way it was actually practiced. Your agency doesn't need inspiration posters. It needs the same thing Jordan brought to every practice: a genuine refusal to leave work that isn't done.
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About Jason Feltman: Jason Feltman is co-host of The Insurance Dudes podcast and a producing insurance agent who has built and scaled agencies from the ground up. He shares the real tactics behind agency growth, no filler, no fluff.
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