My Morning Routine looks each week at how a successful member of the business community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Rana Badawy (LinkedIn), chief actuary at AXA Egypt, the local arm of the global insurance company.

My name is Rana Badawy, and I’m the chief actuary at AXA Egypt. AXA is a French multinational insurance firm which entered the Egyptian market in 2015, focusing on the non-life insurance and health markets. After two years, it acquired one of the largest life insurers in the market. We cater to both corporations and the retail sector in Egypt.

You might ask what on earth the job of chief actuary entails, and a common response is to talk about financial models, projections and probabilities — AUC provides a great overview on this. But that doesn’t really capture my role. In essence, I get to lead a team of incredibly gifted individuals who dive into data and bring meaning to numbers. It’s our job to provide incisive business intelligence and insights that enable management to act quickly and serve our customers better. And it involves a lot of creativity about how to visualize data and make complex issues understandable to everyone.

I would describe myself as the product of many influences and experiences. I was educated at German and American institutions and, while this was testing at times, I feel that experiencing two different educational philosophies helped develop both sides of my brain. But I’m Egyptian at my core: born, bred and intending to stay in Om El Donya. I’m very active and, as a former national volleyball player, I get agitated if I don’t break a sweat every couple of days.

I have a highly entrepreneurial and extremely supportive family. My parents have always tried to use their businesses to benefit society and their family. My brother Yehia is a co-founder of the region’s first fully licensed digital currency exchange. So I think entrepreneurship runs in my blood and at some stage I will follow in their footsteps and go it on my own (but not for a while yet).

I’m an early riser, waking up without an alarm between 4 and 5am. Usually I find at least one of my parents already up, so we get some quality time together before the rush of the day. These golden hours of the morning are my zen time. Creative solutions and new ideas pop into my head and I make sure to write them all down. I catch up on the news (Enterprise, Al Mal, BBC, Guardian, Bloomberg) and have a quick look at my calendar to start mentally preparing for the day. I have a light breakfast and then head to my workout at 7am, in time to be at work at 9am.

I’ve just completed two half marathons, and am now training to complete my first 70.3-mile triathlon.

Being surrounded by business owners, I love watching and reading anything about entrepreneurship. So I’ve enjoyed listening to the podcast How I Built This and watching Shark Tank. I recently read the book Nudge, which gives valuable insights about human psychology and how people are influenced by their environment. It pushes you to think about how to reach people to bring about positive changes in their behavior.

My taste is eclectic when I’m reading purely for enjoyment. It’s important to me to read in Arabic because I’m very proud of my Egyptian heritage, and reading old Arabic literature helps remain connected to the language. So I like to read novels by Yusuf El Sibai and Naguib Mahfouz. At the same time, I enjoy contemporary writers including Roald Dahl, Elif Shafak, and Khaled Hosseini. I read in German whenever possible and recently finished reading the novel Perfume in its original language.

AXA aims to be a “one stop shop,” helping our partners — individuals and businesses — to achieve their long term financial goals by providing quality advice. Insurance companies exist to protect people and to pay claims when needed. We want to have a social impact, and I take pride in the fact that we help people get access to quality medical care — or that we help make sure the recently bereaved don’t fall into poverty. Supporting people suffering through unfortunate events is the core of our business.

I see two areas where the insurance industry will grow substantially in the near future. Increased financial inclusion will hopefully provide a safety net and more accessibility for people who do not currently have any coverage. So microfinance and microinsurance initiatives, as well as the Universal Healthcare Act, will materially increase insurance penetration and people’s appreciation of its value. Meanwhile, technological developments and an improved understanding of data should allow insurers to make it easier for customers to get coverage. I see real appetite in the industry to simplify processes and reduce a lot of the mystery around insurance. The ability to analyze and better understand customer behavior through data will be a game changer.

I do a lot of volunteer work in my spare time, as does my family. My mum works in education, and she has dedicated her life to developing the next generation of thinkers and doers. Her family has an orphanage in Upper Egypt, and my dad has a foundation in the Delta, so it runs in my blood to volunteer for social causes. I am a passionate environmentalist — I’m passionate about a very important initiative called Save Egypt’s Water.

I’m also driven by a desire to explore and learn new things. In the past couple of years I’ve learned parachuting, diving, skiing, kite-surfing, in-line skating, interior design, and beadmaking. History, culture, industries and businesses are built around so many different things, so you never know when you can connect the dots in an unconventional way and carry ideas over to apply them to your own situation. For example, Dyson was inspired by looking at the way airplanes work when he invented his bladeless fan (which he called the Air Multiplier).

I have two main ways of staying organized: Firstly, I try to start every day with a clear and focused vision of what I want to get done. Secondly, I use the Pomodoro Technique, where you break your time into chunks of intense, focused work, punctuated by breaks in between.

The best piece of business advice I’ve ever been given came from my mentor, who shaped the early years of my career in a significant way. It’s simple: If you take care of your people, they will take care of the business.