What would happen if all your wildest dreams come true, your biggest goals achieved…and you had to wake up the next morning and go to work?

That was the situation our guest today found himself in. Casey Crawford went from not making the training camp cut to winning a Super Bowl all in the same season. After his dream came true, he had to wake up and figure out what to do with the REST of his life. 

Casey had a big goal, reached it, and then generated an even bigger goal, to become an entrepreneur that disrupted his industry and put his community in a better position than he found it. Following his football days during a stint in real estate, Casey became alarmed by glaring inadequacies within the lending industry. The greed and corruption among leadership, the lack of value and care toward employees, and the inattentiveness toward community problems seemed like wide-open opportunities. Casey founded Movement Mortgage in 2008 on the Christian values he shares with co-founder Toby Harris. In this episode, he’ll discuss his life in football, entrepreneurship, and his Movement Foundation’s effort to “pour it back in” to his community. 

On today’s podcast…

3:15 – Casey learns from two humble, hard-working entrepreneurs, his parents.

7:48 – Casey’s greatest adversity becomes his greatest opportunity. Casey gets cut from the Panthers and ends up with a Super Bowl

11:37 – How Jon Gruden cast a Superbowl vision on Casey and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

15:07 – Waking up the next day after all your dreams come true.

18:17 – The joy of life is in the journey uphill

28:48 – Casey’s Movement Foundation is growing, attitude aligned and pouring back into the community

36:14 – Great mentors, deep purpose, pour it back out 

NEED MORE ATTITUDE?

• Visit the University of Attitude. America’s #1 source for attitude awareness, development and realignment. 
• Join thousands of others in our Attitude Movement. Change your attitude, change your LIFE!

Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review our podcast. It only takes a second and helps us make more podcasts for you.

• WATCH video episodes of the Get Attitude Podcast on Glenn’s youtube page.

The Get Attitude Podcast is part of the Sell or Die Podcast Network. Subscribe to these other amazing network podcasts!

• Sell or Die with Jeffrey Gitomer and Jen Gluckow
• The Why and The Buy
• Women Your Mother Warned You About
• The Hidden Stories Podcast
• Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay
• Selling with Soul
• Wheelbarrow Profits

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

—

Listen to the podcast here

Booster #2: Casey Crawford Bridges the Gap From Super Bowl Champion to Entrepreneur/Philanthropist

We have an incredible guest that’s going to talk to us about attitude booster number two, which is everybody needs, have a big goal.

—

We are here with the one, the only, Casey Crawford, CEO of Movement Mortgage. Casey, welcome to the show.

I’m glad to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun.

We are going to have a lot of fun. We appreciate your time. I know how busy you are with all the things that you have going. We’re going to focus on this thing on, have a big goal. I have done some research on you. Your story is quite cool. We know about your pro career, but I didn’t hear anything about where you were born, where you came from, where you went to college. I’m not sure what college you played for. What I’d love to do with our GAPers or readers that we have, share with us how it started for you. Who is Casey Crawford?

Maybe from the football back, and then we can talk about your future. What I’d like to know is, when you talk about having a big goal, who taught you about having a big goal and what does that matter? Give us a little history and then let’s get into booster number two. Who put that big goal mentality in your mind?

In the earliest days, I had the incredible privilege of growing up in a home and watching two parents who were both entrepreneurs. They are entrepreneurs in a pretty humble sense though. My dad had a True Value hardware store in DC. It was during the 80’s and the 90’s, the crack epidemic was full-blown. DC was the murder capital of the world. It made Chicago look like a Kumbaya town or something.

My dad ran that store for twenty years. I had to watch him grind in a tough business, in a tough part of the country on day in, day out, people selling them a $1.50 worth of nails. My mom on the other hand ran her own consulting business. She did a human resource consulting business, where she went in and taught soft skills to the government, NASA, Campbell soup, things like time quality management, Myers-Briggs.

I’ve watched my mom putting together her materials at night and organizing these classes around a lot of soft skills that are still incredibly applicable in business now. My dad was my hero growing up. He was a football player and a football coach and ran this hardware store. I would work with him in this blue-collar, tough environment where I get to see an interesting picture even of America. Some of the experience of social living in some of the big cities across America and how difficult that could be at times.

Growing up, I was always a gigantic human being. I was 6’2 and 130 pounds when I was a sophomore or junior high school. I always played sports. I love sports. It was a place where I found a real sense of comradery with friends. God made me gigantic. That helped in football, basketball, and baseball that I would play through high school. I ended up going to the University of Virginia. I played football and baseball. All through my life, I gained great parents and been blessed with some amazing leaders. Many of them were coaches.

I got to play at the DeMatha High school for a guy named Morgan Wootten, who was the all-time winningest basketball coach in history. For 37 straight years, every graduating senior at Coach Wootten’s program had a full college scholarship. You have to be in his system. I ended up transferring out of DeMatha and graduating at another high school.

You got to see what leadership looks like and what it looks like to organize and lead a team. When you’re 13, 14, 15 years old, you don’t always appreciate the depth of the lessons you’re ingesting. You reflect decades later, you realize these rich deposits coaches and men and women have made in you, and made you hope to return a little bit on that investment they’ve made in you, then pour those lessons into the next generation. That’s been a lot of our story here in Movement, taking some of those lessons from the ball field. You enjoy a lot of those, as well. Helping support some of those hard-earned lessons into other people who are looking to grow or to achieve a high level of what they’ve been called and gifted to do.

On a personal note, my cousin played football for Virginia. I know that you probably had an awfully nice time watching those Cavaliers get it done.

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is tar heel country. I know football season have been pretty tough for the last several years. While I was in Virginia, I like to point out that we won and we won a lot. We had George Welsh. He, Joe Paterno, and Bobby Dodd were the only coach in the NCAA that had won seven games or more for a decade. I got to enjoy success.

After I left, it went downhill, and yet, you’re talking about leadership and goal setting, Tony Bennett and now Bronco with UVA men have transformed that program and helped them grow into the sports and athletic program they should be, because it’s a great university. It’s been a lot of fun.

Kyle Guy is an Indianapolis product where we’re based out of. I went to high school with his mom. You mentioned some of the big lessons you learned. What are the best lessons you’ve learned from your athletics career? If there was any lesson about big goals, tell us a story about.

One of the most poignant ones and easily expressible was my first year in Tampa Bay. I was fired from the Carolina Panthers. I was the 54th most valuable player on the team that year. In the NFL, when they say they put you on the wire, you got caught. My mom gets to see it come across ESPN. You’re released. Your talents are released to the world. That’s that obstacle. It says that adversity you face creates the biggest opportunity. It shifts us out of our lane and lets us step into bigger opportunities. I had the privilege of then joining the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

I went down there and a mutual friend, Ken Dilger, was the five-time All-Pro tight end. I have been following All-Pro tight ends. I could have the camp. They got this guy, Gilbert, who never pass or block in his entire career. I’m sitting there and in practice trying to make a team. In that practice, I got an amazing first glimpse into Coach Gruden’s leadership style, how to cast a vision, how to set a goal, and then how to execute on that goal over the course of a season.

I remember poignantly at the end of the very first practice, coach called the whole team in. This was an iconic team. It was Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks and all these All-Pro legends. To be John Lynch. Great team, but they had never been able to make it to a Super Bowl. Coach wanted there with one purpose. Tony Dungy had been the coach previously. Amazing coach, none more respected man in the NFL.

Coach Gruden was brought in there to win a Super Bowl. At the end of that practice, he got everyone together and he looked around, looked in everybody’s eyes, “Get in here. We’re going to win a world championship. We’re going to do with this team. We’re going to do it this freaking year.” When he said that, you can see collectively, everybody’s chest fill up a little more oxygen and you start to stand a little bit taller. He started to cast a vision for what this team could do together. That was beyond any place that they had ever gone. He was speaking it. He’s speaking into reality and he believed. He told us what we were going to do to win a world championship, when we were going to do it, “This year,” and who’s going to do it, “This group.”

The only thing he didn’t say was how we were going to do it. That question was answered the next week when he brought in Coach Mike Tomlin, who was a backup linebackers coach. There’s a whole lesson in there. When you see potential in somebody, call it out. Don’t worry about the race or experience. Show us talent, not experience. He calls Mike Tomlin, who gets in there with his eyes bugging out of his head and says, “We’re going to pound the rock,” and Mike’s hitting this big rock.

Every week it was the same message. “We’re going to pound the rock, world championship. This group. This year. We’re going to do about pounding the rock, this daily commitment to excellence, excellence in the grind, focusing on the minutia of the day, knowing that there’s a bigger place that we’re all headed tomorrow, it’s a place we’ve never been.”

To get there, we’re going to have to do some things that we haven’t done historically and previously. That season was amazing. It was something that grew me so much at the end of it. We ended up playing the Oakland Raiders, who were Coach Gruden’s former team from the year before in the world championship in San Diego. I had a camcorder sitting in my locker, hit record, and Coach Gruden’s in there giving the pregame speech. He says, “I told you, world championship. This group. This year.” We’d all go running out. We have one of the most lopsided victories in Super Bowl history.

It was this great picture of how to cast the vision, give people a picture of where they can go as a team it’s further than they’ve ever gone. Equip it with how. You tell them, “How we’re going to do that?” Hold us accountable to that process, then celebrate when you get there. That for me was a neat experience and a lesson I learned and tried to apply to our own business of casting a vision that was beyond someplace that we each got individually.

People always say, “When the why is big enough, the how follows.” When the vision is big enough, you don’t ask how. You ask why, which I’ve seen you talk about Coach Gruden, now the coach of the Raiders again. One of the guys I coached who was our Mr. Football is his assistant GM now. I’m sure you’ve heard Gruden’s story when he was like, “I don’t like dreams.” Have you heard this? He’s like, “Everybody’s got the same freaking dream. Everybody talks about the same freaking dream. Dreams are boring. Let me tell you what I like. I like nightmares and ruining people’s dreams. Are you with me coach?”

We went to play the last game ever in the Vet. Tampa Bay won a game below 32 degrees. That was their curse. Gruden gets up and he has to get back from a press conference. I told him, “We’ll play on the fricking Brooklyn bridge. We’ll play on Mars. We’re going to show up.” He proceeded to tell them all the things we were going to do to this team. We show up at the Vet.

The pregame movie we watched was The Terminator 1. It’s that scene where Schwarzenegger, he’s coming in to the police station. He’s flipping the shotguns. Gruden goes, “This is what we’re going to do to these guys tomorrow.” We had to go to bed. I was like, “I need a sleep.” We’re so fired up with this game in the morning. That man had a rare ability to motivate and to cast vision.

How tough was it playing in the Vet and our Philadelphia fans are certainly rude as we all believe them to be?

They are worse than I could describe it. I was worried about my mom’s life and safety. My wife and mom were there. I would never let my kids go. We got an amazing contention in Philly. They loved their Eagles. They were probably the same hooligans that were throwing all kinds of stuff on my parents unapologetically. They wouldn’t apologize, I don’t think that my mother probably done. That’s the culture of Philly sports.

 Are you a Panther fan? Where’s your allegiance go?

 I grew up in Washington DC. Redskins. My dad would take me to a DC Skin’s Cowboys game every year. That was an incredibly special memory for me growing up. Whoever you liked when you were 8 years old, 9 years old, you’re never going to rip that out of your heart. I appreciate the teams that wrote me checks. Those memories with my dad going to games as a boy were pretty special.

You talk about having a big goal, “We’re going to win the world championship.” That’s a big goal. It’s been there. You get there. The one thing that we always know and that I talked to people about is there’s nothing worse than accomplishing your goal. I’m sure this wasn’t the case with you and going “God, is that all there is? I hit the goal and that’s all there is. I got to have more.”

You are a world champion and now football ends, what was your mindset? People who are reading this story, trying to figure out who they want to become and where they want to go. There are a lot of people reading that are starting anew or that are considering and saying, “I got to have some guts and create new goals. I may have to start all over again.” Talk to us about what you were thinking and feeling and what was your next big goal after football, if there was one?

I want to give something to your readers here. I thought God gave me a unique gift. At 24 years old, I got to stand on stage having done nothing to deserve this, but sometimes it’s just about being around the right team. Hold the Lombardi Trophy and sing It’s My Life with Pancho. My wife on my side as well, my mom and dad are there. I’m hugging my dad. We’re crying. Confetti’s falling down. My jersey on my left. We’re yelling It’s My Life in the microphone. This is like, “Shoot me now.” That was it. Every dream I had I was getting fulfilled in that moment.

I woke up the next day and we were going to fly back to Tampa Bay to celebrate with the fans. It’s amazing. You hit all these life goals and I don’t know what a goal is. Maybe it’s to close $10 million in transactions or $100 million or whatever it is and you get there. When you wake up in the morning, you realize you feel the same. Yesterday’s euphoria in a moment. You wake up and life goes on. I remember as the plane lifted off, thinking to myself that, “God, there’s got to be more than this.” I realized that in my mind, I started to shift as a man.

If I’m going to invest my life, this one life that I had to live, I’m going to invest it. I want to move from entertaining folks to deeply impacting lives. Entertainment to impact, because the NFL is about entertainment, it is amazing. It’s an incredible platform and you can move, transform, and inspire people, but I wasn’t that uniquely gifted to be great in the NFL. I had this guy, he was frustrated. He was in front of me in the NFL and I knew physically I wasn’t going to be able to do great and impact lives in that way.

I can maybe entertain three special teams watching me get knocked unconscious or something, but I wasn’t going to impact lives. As we took and left off and I said, “I want to think about impacting lives.” What I also realized is that in life, the joy is not in the destination. The joy of life is in the journey. It’s in learning. It’s with the people. Whatever your goal is, wherever you are, whether you’re starting off brand new or you’re moving from good to great or great to another stratosphere, that destination isn’t going to deliver you the joy.

You’ve got to have it on the journey there. The work itself has to bring purpose to your life and give you meaning and fulfillment and it needs to be something that you are passionate about. Again, I realized it wasn’t about getting somewhere, but it’s about what I was going to do each and every day, how I was going to invest this one life that I have. That’s when I began to reconstitute my mind, this vision of creating a business that set up a standard what companies can look like out in the marketplace.

I love the real estate community. I was a realtor. It was my first real job after football. I couldn’t stop there because football is not a real job. It’s hard work, but it is a different environment. I love realtors and loan officers. They have the opportunity every single day to carve their career out. It’s going to be what you make of it. It can be as big as you want it to be, but you have to decide what it is going to be.

America is built on entrepreneurship and there is no profession that embodies entrepreneurship more so than the independent realtor. I was one. I had to think about what it is that I want to architect in this career, in this livelihood that’s going to be different in the marketplace. Fundamentally, the world didn’t need just one more realtor or one more loan officer. How many call you every day?

You want an amazing real estate company. I’m going to guess your phone is full of do-not-calls from loan officers all over the place. You didn’t hope, “I hope one more person gets in the mortgage business.” What I did see is we’re going to do something new and unique, do it differently, do it the way God’s made you using all the unique gifts and skills you have and bring something unique to the marketplace that doesn’t exist there.

That time in Charlotte, North Carolina, it was a financial services company. They want to love our customers, teammates, and the communities that we’re a part of. That wasn’t being done in 2007, 2008 during the Great Recession. In fact, the financial services companies were known for how they had robbed from their customers, made miserable lives for their teammates, and then rob from the very communities they were part of, that they were supposed to be showing into.

We got an opportunity to step into that gap and to do something different. I can tell you when there was four of us, talking about being a movement of change across the nation was a big goal. It was an audacious goal. It was something that was far beyond what any of us had the ability individually to accomplish.

Our goal here at the University of Attitude is to change the world one attitude at a time. You, being on this show, are doing that. You are reaching and you’re talking about things that most people haven’t been blessed enough to be a part of that shift. You’ve always been very humble from what I’ve read about you. Zig Ziglar said it best, “If you see a turtle on the top of a fence post, he sure as hell didn’t get there himself.” What I love to know are who are the people in Movement Mortgage? When you think about attitude, whether their loan officers or people on your team that have big goals, talk to me about 2 or 3.

I got one. I’ve been thinking about it for very long. I got blessed with the greatest partner in the world, Toby Harris. I got on the phone with him. He is in Austin, Texas at a big major real estate conference. He is doing the same thing we were talking several years ago, which is talking with our real estate partners about how we can better serve them and help them achieve their goals. This guy, his energy, his attitude, if I had it several years ago, I’d have been blessed.

He has one of the greatest, most committed, upbeat, positive can-do attitudes of anybody’s I’ve ever been with in my life. It’s the only reason we have an organization now. I love John Maxwell and he’ll talk about that any destination worth reaching is uphill. Anything we’re doing is uphill. It takes effort and energy. There are parts of the climb that are tough and discouraging. Toby and I would do daily counseling with each other.

We’d be picking each other up, telling each other, remind each other of our purpose, encouraging each other saying, “You might feel like the worst mortgage professional in America right now, but I love you. Nobody else might, but I love you. Your wife might not love you right now, but I do.”

For me in particular, Toby was just the guy who constantly poured a positive can-do attitude throughout situations. We can be faced with crazy adversity and it didn’t matter. I was like, “I’m there with you. I love you. I’m proud of you. I’m with you.” Sometimes you got to have somebody with you. You are not alone.

One thing I love that you said, “My father was my hero, too. Football coach.” I coached for 25 years. I’d love to know the best piece of advice your father and Toby Harris gave you.

My dad was a football coach and that was playing football, talking football, and everything is a center point of our relationship. He always told me, “Football for you will end at some point. If you go on to have the best career in the history of NFL, it’s going to end for you at some point. Hopefully, you have a whole lot of life left ahead of you. What will not end are the lessons you learned playing this game will carry you through the rest of your life.”

I look back at so many lessons I learned through talking about attitude, hard work, commitment, grit leadership, integrity, all these things that I learned in playing that amazing game. I appreciate my father saying that because I was able to pay attention to some of those lessons. These weren’t temporary things that were going to benefit me just for this little game temporarily. These were character traits that I needed to develop to be a successful human the rest of my life. That was my dad.

For the people reading, the point is whether you’re an extremely great success and you’re reading this story because you need a kick in the ass, where you are right now doesn’t have to be where you end up there. There’s always a next step. It’s never, ever too late to start something new. That’s what you’re communicating there. You don’t have to keep things the same and you can do it. Toby Harris, does he got a line? He’s got to have a one-liner. He’s got to have something that he always says. It’s got to be brilliant.

Toby is full of one-liners. I’ll tell you one thing Toby always does and one thing I love about him. This is me and there are a thousand other men and women that have the story. Before Toby hangs up the phone, he goes, “I want you to know I love you.” It’s funny, there are so many people, to think they’re the only ones that he says that to. He means it. What an encouraging thing to hear from a partner, from a person to say to you before they hang up the phone, “I want you to know I love you.”

Having a man tell me that for a decade every time we’d hang up the phone. We may talk about attitude, an encouragement, a place of strength. If you have someone in your life who is saying that to you, be that for someone else. He’s got me in the habit of saying to other people that I’m in a relationship with because I know how good it felt to me to hear it. I’m trying to give that to others.

Let’s talk about the love of your life. Obviously, you got a wife. Talk to me about your family and how she affects your attitude to the positive.

I married Rocco Vizzuso’s oldest daughter. My girl’s half Cuban, half Italian, attorney from New Jersey. Michelle, she had the all-time goals record in New Jersey field hockey. She’s eight time All-American in field hockey. Everything you can imagine athletically, she does it. You remember that Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm commercial? I can do better. That’s a life song. Michelle can do better than I can.

I have a feeling I may need to interview her on the show.

You should. All the attitude, all the energy, which we live by that Jimmy V statement, which was, “Laugh and cry every day.” We experienced the full range of emotions. She’s been my best friend for several years. We started dating in college. I never thought I’d be married at 22. We got married at 22. She went to law school. I started playing football and we started this adventure of life together as relatively kids. We have two beautiful daughters. We’re having a lot of fun trying to figure out parenting.

Let me guess, they play field hockey.

That is one of the great ironies in life. I was going to be the dad of the shortstop and the starting quarterback. She has a way better arm than I do. I knew all this. Our oldest daughter is amazing. She plays volleyball and our youngest one was way into theater and science. Nothing that we can coach them in or help them with a whole lot, but amazing children. We’re having a ton of fun parenting.

We talk about ten boosters all the time. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a guest hit all ten. Number one, be nice. You talked about Toby Harris saying he loves you. If what we teach people is if you do all ten of these things every day, you can’t help but have a great attitude. You can’t help become contagious. You can help change the world around you one attitude at the time. Have a big goal. That’s what we’ve talked about. Three, believe in you. Your story about being the fifth, always being behind in All-Pro and what that belief did for you, unbelievable. Have a mentor, copy them.

You’ve mentioned your mentors. Love adversity, you talked about that. What I want to hit is, be a part of something bigger than you. I know that the Movement Foundation, what you guys are doing is incredible. I know that when you’re leading an organization 4,000 people, you have to have something what I call attitude alignment.

One of the best things you can do to align the attitude is something that’s bigger than yourself. Talk to us a little bit about the Movement Foundation, let us know what our GAPers could do to help the Movement Foundation. Maybe there’s a website you could tell us, but, give us a commercial on what you guys are doing? What your LOs and staff are doing?

We talked about being a movement of change in our industry and corporate cultures and communities across America. We use the word love a lot. We define it like this, to love is to act in the long-term best interest of another. We want to act the long-term best interest of our customers, our partners, one another inside the office, and in the communities that we’re part of. We think about goals being a part of something bigger than yourself. The foundation is an expression of that.

That’s how we’re pouring back into the communities that we’re part of. That’s loving the communities, but we want to be something a part of something bigger than yourself. Not just when we give, but when we love our customers. When we’re serving our customers in their quest for home ownership, we have an initiative right now. We have to help increase the rate of Black home ownership in America. It’s a problem. There’s a huge disparity between minority and White home ownership that we need to stand in the gap on and start to be working towards solutions.

That’s just in our industry every single day. There’s a huge problem in corporate cultures across America. The number one issue of bullying in schools is parents’ job satisfaction. We need to start creating work environments where people are coming home energized. They’re coming home full of life, not beaten down in anger because they’ve been such a hostile work environment. We’re trying to be part of something bigger than yourself in the work environment, the way we act every single day and love each other, care for each other, challenge each other to be our better selves.

Finally, if we’ve done those things, we love our customers, our partner, and one another well. We want to be about pouring back into the communities that we’re a part of also in loving our communities well. We think about who needs love. We want to love vulnerable children. We can argue about a lot of things in the United States. It’s easy to find that argument and two opposing sides of an argument. One thing I have not found any argument on is that all of us should care about the welfare of vulnerable kids in the communities we’re part of.

No one has yet had the courage to tell me that’s not an important thing. I welcome that conversation. Everyone wants to tell me, “We shouldn’t care.” We’ve looked at how do we love the most vulnerable among us in the community that we’re a part of. One of the institutions we think needs a lot of help is the American education system. We’ve invested in building an urban-focused charter school called Movement School. About 95% of our kids are below the poverty line, 95% minority. Our kids in two years have four times the academic performance than their demographic peers.

We spent about $15 million to a shopping center, redeveloped the school. We are now building an affordable housing project with some partners on that, and then partner with the biggest hospital system in our state to put an urban health clinic there as well. We can synergistically bring some of the institutions that transformed the experience of people together to serve a community that’s underserved right now and then watch what these kids can do when they’re in an environment that helps them and draws them towards success.

The amazing thing is these little children are gifted and equipped and they’re valuable. They can perform at the highest levels, just like any anybody’s kids in the school, but they are in some tough situations where they are not getting the education they need. They’re in housing that’s unstable and unsafe, creates all kinds of distractions, and they’re not getting the health that they need, when sky’s the limit for these kids. We want to see these kids prove that out so that they set the bar and they start to help other children around America have a bigger vision and goal for what life can and should look like. Don’t be defined by their circumstance. That’s what we’re trying to live into.

The bottom line is you don’t talk about it, you are about it. We love having you. Casey is full of attitude and has given our GAPers a lot of information that I know they can take to help them bridge the gap from where they are to where they want to be, and from who they are to who they want to become.

We are now going to do our segment called Knowledge Through the Decades, where we put our guests on the spot and ask them to give the best lesson they’ve learned, to give the best piece of advice from certain times in their life. The first time obviously is a newborn baby. We don’t even need to know when you’re a newborn baby. You have two daughters. Tell us the best advice you have about starting life.

In life, in general, be open to receive what people have to give you. We love my little girls so much. It’s like, “I know what’s healthy for them. I want to give it to them. I want to give them a nap. I want them to go to sleep because I know what’s good for them.” So much in life laments me. You tend to look and see people that aren’t willing to receive what some folks want to give to them readily. As a newborn, be ready to receive what people have to give you.

I want you to think about being a little kid playing three sports with your old man going to RFK. Ten years old, what’s the best lesson you learned or what’s the advice a ten-year-old Casey can give us?

Be thoughtful about your friend. A bad company corrupts good character, every time. Watch who you’re running with. Be around great kids, great boys and girls. They’re heading the direction you want to go in life.

That lesson works for every decade, doesn’t it? You’re twenty. You’re at the University of Virginia. You’re playing ball. You’re starting to think, “I got this thing maybe figured out.” Put yourself in that. What would twenty-year-old Casey give the advice to our GAPers for?

You got to find some great mentors and leaders. Ask them questions and pour into you. I remember as a 21-year-old sitting with Jerry Richardson of the Carolina Panthers asking him financial advice, always trying to look for people that knew a lot more than I did about a lot of subjects to pour into me as a young man. I’d seek out great mentors at twenty.

I know you haven’t read the book, but you had attitude booster number five. Have a mentor, copy him or her. You’re 30. You’re probably about done playing football or you are done playing football. What was the lesson at age 30? The live moment that our GAPers can take and think about your lesson now.

Know your why. If they get 30, you got to start thinking about investing your life into purpose, something with purpose, something that’s going to have a deep meaning for you. Twenty, you’re going to be grinding. By 30, you have an opportunity to pick your head up, understand what your unique purpose and gifting is in life, and start investing your life into that.

Forty, you’ve done so much. You’ve got to look back on your life and say, “I’ve had a pretty darn good life.” At age 40, what’s the profundity that hits you over the head when you went, “Holy crap, I’m 40?”

At 40, maybe it’s pour back out. If the 30s was finding purpose and living into it, hopefully at 40s, you start to pour it back out. That’s a transition I’ve been through. I realize I’ve been able to do some incredible things in the last several years. I want to pour out what I’ve learned with next generation leaders who are looking for some guidance and leadership in their own life.

Casey, you did amazing. We started with take it all in. We ended with pour it all out. You’re unbelievable. This is one of the most fun interviews I’ve done. You have so much to offer the world. Thank you for changing the world one out of the attitude at a time. We thank you for giving us time for our GAPers. I’m sure that there are people who are reading.

If they listen intently that your messages of hope, caring, and love will make them feel better, help them dedicate themselves to the way to think. You’re outstanding. Great luck to Movement Mortgage. Unbelievable company. I hope you have continued growth and we were honored to have you. Thank you so much, Casey.

Likewise. I love what you guys are doing. If I can do anything for you guys at all, be sure to reach out.

—

One thing you can take from Casey is he’s a big gold guy. He’s not only a big person. A blessed person. I just loved it when he talked about, number one, being nice and the power of telling people that you love them. I love the idea that he is doing something bigger than him. I know that we all got to listen and go, “That guy’s got a pretty incredible life.” What I’m going to encourage you to do is not let a person like Casey make you feel worse about yourself. What I would encourage you to do is have Casey inspire you to reach the goals that you want to have.

The life that Casey lives, the accomplishments that he has had did not come from setting small goals. It came from having a big vision and a big goal and believing in himself, and all these other attitude boosters that we’ve talked. What spoke most to me was the credit that he gave his mentors and the other people. I loved the fact that you could tell how much he loves his wife and his family.

I want to encourage each and every GAPer to sit there and think bigger about their life. Sit there and understand that no matter where you are, it has nothing to do with where you are going to end up. You cannot be defined by where you are currently. Most importantly, you cannot be defined by other people. I hope that you take this message of having a big goal. You set some new, big goals for yourself.

Important Links

• Movement Mortgage
• Movement Foundation
• Movement School
• Attitude Movement with Glenn Bill – Facebook
• Sell or Die with Jeffrey Gitomer and Jennifer Gluckow – Apple Podcasts
• The Why And The Buy – Apple Podcasts
• Women Your Mother Warned You About – Apple Podcasts
• The Hidden Stories Podcast – Apple Podcasts
• Street Smarts with Harvey Mackay – Apple Podcasts
• Selling with Soul – Apple Podcasts
• Wheelbarrow Profits – Apple Podcasts
• fm/adchoices

About Casey Crawford

Casey is the Co-Founder and CEO of industry-leading Movement Mortgage and Chairman of the Board for Movement Bank. He has led an impressive career which spans football, financial services and nonprofit work. His stint in professional football included winning a Super Bowl ring as a member of the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He played for the Carolina Panthers from 2000 to 2001.

In 2008, he founded Fort Mill, S.C.-based Movement Mortgage, which is one of the 10 largest purchase mortgage lenders nationwide. His nonprofit Movement Foundation has invested more than $75 million in Movement School charter schools; the Movement Center, a nonprofit coworking space; and Elhanan, an 1,100-acre nonprofit farm in Uganda.