From a British paratrooper to selling t-shirts on California beaches to creating some of the most popular tv series. Mark Burnett has a rare set of skills. He has some unique ways of defining success and failure. Success, he says, isn’t about buying things with money you make, but rather, providing yourself with the “glorious privilege” of being independent–an idea culled from the work of Scottish poet Robert Burns. Failure, on the other hand, is an “imposter,” per Rudyard Kipling, who implied it was an event that would eventually result in success. With “Survivor” on its 39th season, it is hard to argue that Mark’s views are faulty. In this conceptual age Mark has made the most out of his R-Directed Thinking style.

Since the age of 14, Alex Timm has been in the car insurance business. He worked for his father’s company making phone calls to help customers with their insurance policies. Despite it being a very complicated, mathematical type of business, he loved how there was a noble cause to the business. After finishing college Alex took a position with Nationwide Insurance. During his time working for the insurance giant, he saw the insurance industry needed to make some changes, especially in customer satisfaction. So he created his own company, Root Insurance, with a more customer-friendly system in mind.

Root utilizes analytics, digital channels, and self-service together to make a more accurate quote for policyholders. The company promises better drivers with a reward of lower rates. Getting a quote is very simple.  All you have to do is download the app and over a period of three weeks it will track how well you drive. Next, they send the data to a team who runs predictive analytics on it to generate a quote for the driver.

When creating his company, Alex had no intention of making the technology and selling it off to a major insurance company. He saw how broken the system of pricing car insurance was and wanted to fix the problem. This all comes from his passion to serve the customer. The idea takes away needless variables and focuses on how the customer drives. Recently, Root has cooperated with Tesla to provide a discount when drivers use Tesla’s Autosteer system while driving. This is a questionable move by Root, since many people predict autonomous driving will hurt the car insurance business. However, Alex believes insurance will have to evolve with the innovation of self-driving cars making insurance cheaper.