Special Guest Britton Costa PT1

Count money, man. Money, man.

That gritches.

I'm trying to told him. I'm a beast.

But

What's up gang?

Welcome to the grind cast.

Stop it, area.

Here. Get ready.

It's a new day.

New day.

What's up gang?

Welcome to another episode of the grind cast.

Get ready. It's a new day.

We got big perm, of course.

And we got a special guest,

Britain Costa in the house.

All six, six, six, seven, six, nine of them over here.

We had to put the hydraulics.

You know, I just found out we had to chair

that goes up and down.

I could have bought myself a couple of inches.

We had to bring them down down low.

I level with us over here.

So we got Britain Costa in the house.

And man, we come a long way since the last time

I was able to have, we had Britain over here

long time when we first started the podcast.

And I think I just kept looking at you and laughing

for like 30 minutes.

We didn't get anywhere. I just started.

So you got two words out.

I started laughing.

Yeah.

And it was like 20 minutes.

What was the setup?

What did it look like?

We had a, what do we have a picnic table?

And that was it.

Very, very, very close.

We got to get you closer.

There we go.

Clear now.

Yeah.

We're very, very generic.

Couple lamps.

You in the background, but we weren't trying to look at

because you were making us laugh.

Yeah.

He was not on the official grind cash yet.

The firm was in the background.

There you are.

Adding to the laughter.

Yeah.

You were in the background like a microphone like this.

Did he back in the 90s?

picnic table.

Yeah.

Straight, the white picnic table.

And we were in trouble.

Thugging it out.

We were on the ropes in the first 10 seconds.

And the fact that we got through that one was amazing.

But now it's the Super Bowl.

I walked in here.

I sit down and I said, what is this?

Because you got to prep somebody for this.

There's light, light, light, boom, screen, screens behind me.

I'm low.

I'm sitting down way low.

But we ready to rock.

Perm got his own mug.

Oh, yeah.

Over there.

Yeah.

Yeah, really.

Speaking of his own mug.

So those that don't know, Britain has been a multiple time MVP award winner in our agency

in our organization.

We're getting ready to rename it to the Heisman.

This would be a multiple Heisman trophy winner in our organization.

And absolute superstar game changer in this business.

And had the opportunity not only to see him grow as business, but write a book and get

married and have children and be one of the definitely one of the most valuable players

in our organization.

So looking forward to exposing everybody to Mr. Costa.

Why don't you just open it up and tell us a little bit about your story for people that

don't know you.

Give them a snapshot of where you came from and how you got to this point.

Wow.

A little bit about where I come from, you know, I come from a small town called South Park.

It's not the cartoon.

Right.

Every time I repeat it from South Park.

Where is South Park?

Yeah.

I don't even watch it.

I watch funny stuff like that.

But modest area, right?

Humble area, modest means, good people, hard work in blue collar area.

And you can kind of talk big, but I don't know if you're really permitted to dream big.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Oh, yeah.

I think when they do, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Right.

And you say it and you're like, well, what do you realistically want to be?

And that's good to a point and you can get so far just in high school.

And then I pursued my education at West Virginia University.

Now, the first thing that a lot of people are going to say, oh, well, why did you go to

West Virginia University?

That's exactly why I went to West Virginia University.

Everything that pops in your mind.

That's where I met your wife.

I met your assistant.

I mean, we've been friends for years.

And the reasons why I went there initially, I got that background of maybe not the most

discipline at the time.

So people that don't know West Virginia's a number one party school at the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Number one, that was the ranking when you went there.

Number one.

And he went with the Nats.

The NADD, my right hand and my wife who NADD introduced me to my wife.

So they knew Britain before I even knew.

Yes.

And a lot of people talk about you need a college education, right?

And I think at college, you really do get to open up your mind a lot, right?

You get to start to see bigger things and start like as much as it's a party school or

four and around and all that nonsense to a degree, then you start to say, wow, things

are big.

The world's much, much bigger than what I'm used to.

And the thing that I could say with West Virginia is that it made me very diverse.

You've got a lot of diversity, people with different backgrounds, people with different

things.

And you can adapt to all of them because they all become very, very good friends of yours,

right?

When I came out of WVU, I went in the industry, the steel industry, which I couldn't really

use that gift.

Speed up to how I ended up here, that gift, the diversity part of what I learned at WVU,

not the algebraic expressions or the English 101.

I had to go to CCAC to get past that.

Right.

Let's keep that real.

But it was the diversity of how many people that we get to work with in this industry, right?

Because it's opportunity unlimited.

Right.

Truth, different walks of life.

The only way you're going to be a beast is if you can work with so many people.

And everybody that's come from WVU, this is no joke.

They'll hear this right now from the listeners.

I know the ones walking from WVU, like he's right, we're all beasts because of the diversity

that we saw at West Virginia, diversity in all the great walks of life.

So there's definitely value in the, in the partying atmosphere.

We have to recruit out of the party school.

Party school school.

And that's what I'm here.

I'll go.

I know a lot of the different diversity of your outdated first.

So yeah, that's a strong factor.

Speaking of transferring into business, what would you say would be three key traits about

some of the characteristics of people that do well in our business or just in what you've

seen in business in general?

The first one I'm going to say is I think you got to be fiercely competitive.

I think that is in society now, we're kind of watered out.

Kind of diluted.

You know, like we come out and we talk about participation, we talk about everybody's going

to win.

We talk about, oh, just do it.

You got a great shot.

You make it up.

That's not true.

You'll get steamrolled by those who fiercely competitive.

Yes.

It's not talked about enough and it's not preparing people enough.

Don't get me wrong.

You can show up every day.

You can learn every day.

You can, you know, say I'm going to work a little bit extra.

But if you don't have a fierce competitiveness about you and I'm not talking smashed the next

guy or smashed your brother or smashed his, I'm talking fiercely competitive being better

the next day than you were the day before, the next week than you were the week before.

It's going to be very, very hard in this world and they don't prep us enough in life

about this.

Now it's like, oh, everybody got a shot.

Everybody go out there.

Just get it.

You keep it fair.

It's not going to be fair if you don't have a fierce competitive edge.

That's what I was going to say.

What's not fair, you know, is I think.

The kids think that I just get a college degree and that's what I'm going to pay me a

hundred thousand now plus for the rest of my life.

It's the non-traditional, you know, the things outside of that education, you know, that

really like you mentioned.

I could have got some of these things at CCAC but it's these outside things.

So you think that, you know, one out of those, you think would be competitiveness.

Yeah.

What other ones you get?

It's a competitive.

I too, I'd say lifelong learner.

You have to be a lifelong learner and I'm not talking, you know, just to say, oh, I know

how to do math or I know how to do science.

I'm talking, being a lifelong learner, if you want to grow in business and you want to

grow in leadership, you have to be proactive to it because a lot of things are going to

come, which I'm sure we'll get into at some point in the conversation and there's nothing

you can do about it.

But if you lack the learning, you're never proactive to the problems that are one thousand percent

going to come.

And if you look at all the successful people, this is what a lot of people don't highlight

enough is the most successful people that we see business, sports, theater, whatever it

is.

They solve the most problems.

And the only way you can solve the most problems is if you're the most knowledgeable and have

you know, wise counsel, right?

Truth is the fact.

Truth.

Too many people get, oh, I got this point I can stop learning.

I mean, I think I did that at some point in high school.

Like I graduated.

I never have to read another book again.

Right.

What they don't say is that you have to keep going to say, oh, if you're not learning, you're

dying.

If you're not learning, you're not solving it.

If you're not solving, things get very, very unhappy, very, very quickly.

No doubt.

Right?

If you're not learning, it's going to affect your earnings.

Yeah, you go.

Right.

Earning just out of L. That's what you're trying to say.

There it is.

Boom.

You know what I mean?

What you got?

Number three.

I'm giving us them two gems.

I say a great communicator.

You got to be a great communicator.

It'll help you.

Yeah.

In relationship, it'll help you.

But with communicating, it's not always just talking, right?

It's how you act a lot of times.

That's how communication, the real goal doesn't talk.

It's caught.

And it's listening a lot of times if you're a great communicator because 90% of the time,

if you're a great communicator, people like you.

And when they start a business or if they want to follow you in leadership, it's like

you, I like you or want to be like you.

I say this all the time, right?

But people love to be heard.

Yes.

And when you start to hit people, when you're listening in a real good listener and you're

hitting them with acknowledgement statements and you have them explain it and they get

more in depth and then they're like, wow, this person feels me right now.

Yes.

Great communicator.

You can do a lot of great things when you can communicate because it's not what, even

if you don't know what you're talking about, it's not really what you say.

It's how they make you feel.

Right.

And you're like, I love this guy.

He's standing for you like, I don't know, but he just made me feel damn great.

Right.

He's communicating right.

No doubt.

So no doubt would say those are three things that could definitely get the deal right.

I've heard, you know, I've heard people say that, you know, it's not people remember,

not always what you said to them, but how you made them feel.

And that's what you're saying.

What about the, you know, people have had influence.

None of us are self-made.

Right.

That happens great, you know, takes two people or more, you know, somebody had to impact

you.

You know, I just cringe when people say that they're self-made, you know, or there's

no, I don't, there's no self-made.

There is somebody had to help you.

Nothing great happens by yourself, right?

Even to have a baby, you can't do that by yourself.

Right.

Take, take multiple people from the doctors to the, you know, to the spouse and all

of that stuff.

So who would be the people that you think have had some influence on you?

Most influential people in your life.

What did you learn from those people?

I don't know if you could pick only three.

I don't.

I think there's three and probably a lot of different areas, any financial services,

right?

Right.

Then you have like life lessons and core values.

Then you have just, you know, some of the different walks.

If I want to the foundational route of the people that had the most influence on me,

it would probably be my grandparents.

And I moved in with them.

That's what I was doing to us.

Why?

I moved in with them when I was in fourth grade.

A lot of people don't know this.

And you know, when you switch up the environment a little bit when your young things change, well,

my grandparents were those old school traditional people, right?

And you guys are from Youngstown.

They actually were from Youngstown and moved to Pittsburgh for the school.

See, there it is.

There it is.

I was trying to figure out why he was so cool.

Right.

There it is.

And there it is.

He had Youngstown.

He been holding it from us the whole time.

Look at him.

That's all I had to say.

I was telling him, he's still youngstown shuffle.

But they, man, they just, they never said a bad word, right?

And you watch that with people.

And they always talk highly and they always believed in you.

And they always would say, I do the right thing and finished what you started and stuff like

this.

This is like the core to pretty much everything I do to the point in my life now, where

I literally ask myself, what would they do in this situation?

Right?

I know it's going to be the right thing because they never, you know, they never got out

of pocket or they never thought they always found the best in people, which is a skill that

isn't bad in any industry.

Right.

You know what I'm saying?

Give them a benefit of the best in people.

And I think, I mean, again, you could go for the financial services in our relationship

and, and Maddie and all the stuff that we do.

And that you can go, you know, more tough love advice, which would be my father, you know,

that comes in.

There's so many different walks in influential people, but the foundation of me would be my

grandparents for sure for those reasons.

What, what things speaking of grandparents looking back in the past, look back, you know,

maybe five, ten years ago.

Yeah.

You know, what things do you wish you knew five, ten years ago that would, you know, impact

you now, you know, if you're, man, I wish I knew that ten years ago.

I wish I knew that five years ago.

And when you're talking about communicating, I'm thinking like, man, ten years ago, I

wasn't as good of a listener.

I still got to just ask Natalie, I still got to get better.

But I think I've become better at listening and asking questions and letting people talk

versus just being the one that, you know, tries to dominate the conversation.

So what, what, what, what things do you look back ten years ago, five years ago?

You know, you wish you knew then that, you know, something you know now.

I, I think I wish if I went back five to ten years ago, I was more self-aware.

And what I mean by that, I wish I had more emotional maturity.

I was good at a lot of stuff, you know, going on nine years here now.

We knew when I was coming in there was potential.

There was some capacity that we could fill.

But for me, it's the self-awareness and the emotional maturity because if I was good at

something, I might have been good at work ethic or good with people or good in sales, but

damn.

Something went wrong.

My emotions came out like a toothpaste.

Fruit, but couldn't get them back in.

And it's, you know what I'm saying?

It's, yeah.

Like it's so young.

Yeah.

And you look back and you're like, um, the reaction rather than a calculated response.

Like if somebody would have just told me, chill, little man, chill, you're going to be

fine.

And I'd be like, I got, you know, on a panic and you waste so much time on that.

And then you say things that you're like, whoop, wish I could get about, you can't get

that back.

And then people were like, I remember you said that and I'm like, I didn't, well, you

said it mean it.

Yeah.

I was mad.

I had that like emotional maturity.

If I went back and tell myself, man, you got to get some emotional maturity because if

not, it's just going to be.

to keep spinning and going nuts.

And I think that does come with maturity,

but it wouldn't have been bad if somebody

would have gave me the heads up and said,

hey, look for this dog.

Like this is gonna come.

Right, chill.

And the sacrifice part,

like some things that sacrifice in the last five to 10 years

would be my environment.

You know, I always go on a WVU

what was cool wasn't successful, right?

Like I was like, oh, this is cool.

But look, what do you mean you had to sacrifice your environment?

The people that, you know, the things that I look forward

to doing were not successful things.

You know what I mean?

If you go to Southside and get drinks

or go to a tailgate and be hurting on Monday.

You know what I mean?

Like again, this is party.

Party, you know growth, there's no maturity to that.

And in great people, but we talk about a lot.

You gotta be mentally tough in anything that we do,

but you gotta also be environmentally tough.

And with your core, with your people.

And I like that.

Environmentally tough, not just mentally tough,

but you're environmentally tough.

I'm mentally tough.

I like that.

And that change is sniff.

And until you, until you know what you're saying,

you're gonna change.

Word best.

And then until you change that environment, you can think big,

but you really don't have that, you know, that wisdom.

You can talk big, but you don't have the knowledge

of the blueprint, how.

And again, great people, great stuff.

But it just wasn't the same direction.

I wanted to go here and I wanted to be this.

I knew that when I was young.

Both of you knew that as well.

I didn't have the environment.

So five to 10 years ago, if there's something to sacrifice,

now it's that.

Now you'll never catch me in a club.

Unless we're down, smoking cigars and Marko Island

like we were last week.

And then we just disappear.

Yeah.

Then we don't even say bye to each other.

Yeah, you know, who's gonna sneak out first?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So speaking of sacrifices and looking back on time,

what about, it was cool.

I heard Bernstorf, one of the young up and coming studs,

you know, say today that when he looks at the people

that make it at the top, the people that crush it at the top,

they're all people that have gone through adversity

and didn't give up.

And the thing about going through adversity

is the only way to handle the adversity properly

is to work on yourself and have self,

you know, be pouring into yourself

and have self development helps you to get through

the adversity and the adversity is what helps you get to the top.

So how have you been able to get through, you know,

nine years, you know, hasn't always been peaches and cring?

You know, I tell people when you see them,

you know, like at the leadership school, you know,

people look up to you here, people admire you,

you know, not just looking up to you because I'm five,

six and a half, you know, I like to say five, seven of,

you know, in your six, six, you know, I'm always looking up to you.

Like people are genuinely, they look up to you

and I say, man, look, when you see them coming, you know,

with the nice black and the brightening on

and the loose on the shoes and all that swag,

you could just see them smell them coming.

Right, got it down there.

I knew he was coming.

I had to bring it.

That it wasn't always that way.

No, no.

And that there was some things that he had to go through

and there's, there's, I've witnessed you go through obstacles

and adversity that I've watched some people,

those things, same things, take them out of the game

and you after those things when MVP awards.

Come on.

After that.

So how did you, how do you, how do you recommend people

getting through, you know, obstacles, adversity, tough times?

Let's go.

One, it's the simplest question in the book is remember why you started.

Nobody asks us.

They're just worried about where they are.

Why did you remember why did we start?

Right.

The next thing that I do is I go back

and I completely define reality of what I'm really doing

in comparison to what I really need to do

or and what needs course corrected in that situation.

And so many people say, oh, you're gonna grow through it

or do you ever hear when people say,

what got you here is I'm gonna get you there.

The adversity, my mindset into it

is that it has to happen because we have to reinvent ourselves

to a degree to get better.

You still got your core, you still got your foundation

but you got to continue to reinvent.

Evolve and evolve.

Evolve.

What I do is I go back to when I was performing

and met my peak.

Written, what were you really doing?

What time were you really waking up?

Were you drinking water, were you drinking beer?

Are you waking up at nine or are you waking up at six?

Were you doing development two times a week?

Are you doing it every other way?

You know what I'm saying?

I go back to the peak state when I'm writing my best,

when I'm having my best relationships,

when I'm doing my best work

and I put myself into that frame literally

like going on the MVP stage.

I start to relive the speeches.

I start to relive that feeling

and I do this with my guys when they're hitting a slump too.

They'll tell you, we walk through March, Manus,

we walk through what they felt like

when people were asking them, give me advice,

how did that feel, what did that do

when you're speaking on the stage, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And I literally watch them flicker.

Like you can watch them go back to,

yeah, I'm not doing any of this right now.

As long as I start hitting the massive action

and start getting into the frame where,

nothing can stop me.

I knew this was common, obstacles,

you know, didn't just jump in the way, they are the way.

Period, that's what it is.

They don't come, they are.

Absolutely, right?

It's part of the journey.

Part of the journey, that's the upfront negotiation

everybody said, oh, I don't know where this hit me from.

It's been there, I knew it was coming

and that's why I don't understand.

When people are going downhill

and they start to create narratives of problems coming up

and I'm like, don't do it.

If things are going smooth, enjoy the jog right now

because it's gonna come back up

and it's inevitable, it's gonna come.

But when it does, you gotta be prepared for it

and say, nope, do it was coming.

Let's go back to the exact rituals, routines

and habits that get us successful.

Let's hit it with massive action.

Let's stay positive, let's stay optimistic.

Let's take it one day at a time.

And then when you're not counting the days,

it just gets done and you get better.

Amen.