Tim: When you think of the word ‘successful’, who is the first person who comes to mind, and why?

Casey: Whoa thats a tough question. My grandmother. My grandmother’s probably the most successful… she passed away at age 92 and she’s my hero, she’s my muse, she’s my everything. And the reason why is she started tap dancing when she was six years old. She was a little fat girl, and her parents made her do something to lose the weight. So she started tap dancing and she loved it. And she fell in love with something at age 6, and she didn’t stop tap dancing until the day before she died at age 92. She died on a Monday morning at age 92, and the first thing we had to do when she died was call her 100 students and say she wasn’t going to make class that day.

She was never rich, she actually never had a whole lot of money; she was a tap dance instructor. She dedicated all the proceeds from her tap recitals to the American Cancer Society to to raise money to beat cancer ’cause cancer took her father. So she’s a total hero and a philanthropist despite not having the means. And then on top of that, what is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how much time you spend, or how little time you spend, doing what you hate. And this woman spent all day, every day doing what she loved. All day. She spent almost no time doing what she didn’t want to do. She just did what she loved the most in life, which is dancing. You wake up in the morning, she’d be dancing. You go to bed at night, she was watching Fred Astaire on TV.

That was 86 years of her 92 years of existence she spent doing nothing but exactly what she loved, and I just can’t think of a higher benchmark of success than that.