Brad Costanzo breaks down success into four steps: confirm your goal is physically possible, learn what you need to know, gain access to resources and people, then build influence to get others to act. He uses his own business deals and podcast to show how access and influence can shortcut years of learning.
Chapters
The next mental model that I discovered over the past few years, and I'm kind of continuously adding to it, was going for a walk on the beach and I had this kind of little epiphany because I was trying to break down what has been the secret of my success. Physics and knowledge. So physics is very easy. Is what you want to do possible or impossible? Does it break the laws of physics? Because if it doesn't, congratulations, you have a shot. Now the only thing standing in your way, or one of the only things is knowledge. I recently bought a business and I didn't. I sold a couple businesses, but buying one is a totally different story. I didn't know what I was doing. I was like, okay, I think I negotiated a powder good deal, but I could probably drop the ball. There's a million ways I can be burned. What am I going to do? And I was like, well, I need any knowledge on a couple things. So I studied, I read, and I made some phone calls and I learned, right? So this is very, by the way, this is very elementary. It's not impossible. The only thing standing in your way is knowledge of how to do it. Because there's a million things here. You guys know exactly how to do, like the most basic to some, like your jobs, your businesses, you've got knowledge how to do it. There's no, there's no second guessing. You just jump in and you do it. But what if you don't have that knowledge? What if the knowledge is hard to acquire? That comes down to the other parts of the formula, which I believe very strongly in. And when I look at it, it's not only the secret of my success, it's the secret of everybody's success, even nation states, which is access and influence. So access is a very interesting word. When I say access, some of you might think, do you know? But that's not how I, I see access as a very rich word. Access means, you know, when you were growing up, did you have access to loving, supportive parents who had maybe money to put roof over your head and send you to a good school? Or did you not have access to that? Did you have access to capital to start a business? Do you have access to mentors and friends who will support you? And access to a loving relationship? And if you don't have access to that, you're kind of, you know, you're kind of at a disadvantage. But also understand the difference between access and ownership, because you can access something without owning it. I don't have to have a car. I can pull out my phone and I can access somebody else's car because they're driving Uber or Lyft. I don't have to have the money because I can either learn how to go raise venture capital or angels or I could do a crowdfunding kickstarting campaign or I could do another way to access somebody else's money. And oftentimes if you don't know how to do that, it's simply a function of knowledge. Right, and how do you get access to knowledge if you don't feel like reading a book? Well, that's where you access mentors. That's where you access somebody like Nick Unsworth over here, or you access somebody who's went down that road and tried it before and they know the ins and the outs. They're like, I got you. Here's what you do, here's what you don't do. Let me shortcut it for you. I've got amazing people access to in masterminds and businesses and colleagues that I cultivate these relationships so that I can access them. The reason I have a podcast on on itunes is not for my audience. I'm proudly the host of the most selfish podcast on all of my. It is designed for two things. If nobody listens, it allows me to talk to people that I really want to talk to and build relationships with. It allows me to pick their brain, which is normally a word I hate because it's me just getting but allows me to pick their brain and get amazing information. But I also give them a platform to share their knowledge with the world. And that is one way I access influential minds who are just brilliant. And it has shortcut my learning curve. One day I was at a mastermind and I heard a guy talking and it was just blowing my mind. When he was like telling me, I was like, I never really heard about this stuff and I want to know more. He's sitting right over here, Mitch Axelrod. And I was like, this is amazing. How do I access what's in your brain? Like I kind of want to download it. And I think I wrote him a check for like $10,000 to be able to just get on the phone with him like I don't know, like eight times or something like that and just say, alright, tell me about this, tell me about this. Elaborate on this. It was worth it to me to understand how his brain works and how he approaches these things. And I was willing to go into my wallet and pay for it because I wanted access to his knowledge without reading a million books. And the very last one of those formula is influence. Because you can have all the knowledge and all the access in the world. If you can't influence somebody to take action, a customer to buy from you, somebody to partner with you, a man or a woman to date you, you know, anywhere, you can't make an influence on them. You can't make an impact, you can't make a difference. So if you have access and you can build influence, interpersonal influence and mass influence, you have so much power. I mean, think about the way kings and nation states were built. I mean, they had either access to resources or not. And if they had access to the people and they influenced them to fight for them, this is the way that Washington is wrong. Access and influence can be a technology for good, or it can be a technology for corruption. And I won't go down that road. But is it against the laws of physics? What knowledge do you need? What access do you, can you get even if you don't own it? And what influence do you need to wield in order to get that into action, to put it into action and make a difference?
