Though usually considered trivial, your habits actually make up a huge chunk of your attitude and character. By gamifying your habits, starting from your morning ritual all the way to your eating patterns, huge changes may come your way, especially when hitting your goals. Jen Du Plessis talks to William Moore on how to apply this technique to your daily life. Will is a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, life coach, and happiness expert. Together, they discuss the right way to pinpoint and eliminate bad habits, as well as understand how your core values impact them. Will also shares his thoughts on how the pandemic’s technological changes might change the way habits are formed and explains how his concept of funeral exercise works.
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The Power Of Gamifying Your Habits With William Moore
I am excited to have this guest with us. William Moore who goes by Will so we’ll be able to call him Will. I’m excited to have him because we were first introduced by a colleague of ours and we probably spent an hour and a half on the phone and said, “We should have recorded our conversation on the phone because we had so much fun.” Hopefully, we’ll have more fun left here as we’re talking. Will, I want to welcome you to the show.
Thank you for having me. It is an absolute pleasure to be here.
Let me give a little bit of background about you so that everybody knows who we’re talking to. You’re an honors graduate from Rollins College, a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, life coach, and happiness expert. His number one mission in life is to gamify the process of personal wellness so that people become addicted to becoming the happiest and best version of themselves, in turn paying it forward to help the world, which is exactly what this show is all about. One of the things that we were talking about that we want to hone in on is a couple of things. One creating good strong habits. The other is the gamification of the habits, especially because we’re in the COVID cocoon.
This is a good time to make some changes in your life. We’re coming up to the end of 2020. Everyone is excited about the new year’s resolutions, which don’t ever go far. Before we head into that, I wanted some backstory about you and how you got to this point because you had a successful career and now there’s this impact that you want to provide to the world as a result of what you went through. Would you share with us the success that you had?
When I hear you were successful, I’ve trained myself to dissociate the word success with finances and career which I know is what 99.9% of people still do. It is indeed if you look at the way I look through the lens of the world, there are these five core areas that we all need to be successful in. Career and finance are one of them, but it’s one part of it. I was able to, fortunately, exit our business in 2019 that we were growing over the last 10 to 12 years, a restaurant delivery service. It’s similar to a Grubhub, Uber Eats or DoorDash. Those are what most people are familiar with. We started way before all of those guys.
You build a business and I think most people hope to one day be able to exit. We were fortunate and thankful to be able to do that. My journey started and it was a rough ride growing up. My parents got divorced at an early age. I grew up and was born in Hawaii, then moved to Honolulu. Hawaii, which sounds luxurious on the surface, but we were living in a van. My parents divorced early. My mom was an alcoholic. She comes from a family of alcoholism as well. My grandfather was a three-star general in World War II. He passed on the rage and the alcohol gene to my mom.
By the time, I got to college and we moved to DC when I was seven, but that’s in Maryland. I never felt like I meld in. I was insecure, your typical victim, convinced life was out to get me. There was nothing I could do about it. My brain was broken like a lot of people tend to do. As a teenager, your hormones are raging. You’re like, “Why does my brain work this way?” I got to college. I was like, “This is a fresh start. I’m going to get it going and start fresh here,” because I’d had a miserable experience up until then. I put all my hopes and dreams into getting into this fraternity, which to a lot of people sounds silly because some people didn’t go to college.
I feel like it’s one of these privileged problems to have, but at the time in my world, at my university, that was the most important thing. I wanted to be accepted somewhere. Everybody in my hall got into a fraternity. I did not. Knowing what I know about humans, universal principles, and not focusing on yourself, and putting the focus on the other, making them feel special, it’s no surprise that I didn’t because I was insecure and it was all about me. At that time it was devastating and I was at rock bottom. I was suicidal, not just for that, but that was the needle that broke the haystack with a cherry on top.
I was serendipitously fortunate to have one of my favorite professors introduced me to a book called How to Win Friends & Influence People. I admired this guy. He was the kind of guy I wanted to grow up to be. He was like a cool dude, but yet he was smart and could relate to people, with both teachers and students. I went after class to the library, I devoured it. I have discovered that there’s another way to look at life. I became this insatiable self-help junkie. I’m getting my hands on as many self-help materials, books, seminars that I could get my hands on, and using myself as a human science experiment where I would test different things, what worked, what didn’t, and taking crazy notes.
I’ve always been a crazy note-taker, writing things down of what worked, what didn’t, and it kept growing. Slowly but surely, I did start to get out of that hole and change my mindset from your typical victim to more of an owner mindset. Over the years, I kept reading, kept growing, kept trying things, kept learning what I considered this universal truth or what I call total truths, which to me are things that have been around since the beginning of time. They’re going to be around until the end or until we destroy ourselves. You can hang your hat on them. Things like from Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends & Influence People. Make the other person feel special, that’s all the book was about.
Take the focus off yourself, make the other person feel special, and using those to your benefit. As I started to evolve and get better in my finances, career, relationships and my physical health, all these things started to improve. At some point, I had my first child. I said, “I need to turn this into something more than just something for me.” When I sold my business, it was the perfect segue into making this my life’s mission.
[bctt tweet=”Habits don’t care if they’re good or bad for you; they’re just going to do their thing.” username=””]
You and I have talked about this before, my father was an alcoholic. I want to ask you about this too, you have become a people pleaser. You’re saying, “It was all about me and that’s why I didn’t get in the fraternity because I was all focused on me. I wasn’t focusing on other people.” The bottom line is you were focused on other people, what they thought of you, what they judged of you. Because you came from this background, you covered it. You don’t want people to see it.
That’s how I was. I was like, “I don’t want anybody to see this other side. I’m going to focus on them.” Technically, you’re focusing on yourself because you’re hiding from it. The challenge of going from victim to victor is multiple ceilings. One of the things that I learned from Al-Anon is that we do walk around with alcoholism of sorts, and we have these weaknesses that we will lean-to in a bad situation. It may not be the actual drink, but there is some type of alcoholism. Do you feel that you had something at some point in time prior to you becoming a self-help junkie, which is not your alcoholism? It may be a new direction, but do you feel like you had something that you had growing up until you realize that?
That’s something in terms of?
Some form of alcoholism like mine, for example, is accumulation buying. If I get stressed, I go shopping and that’s not a woman thing, that’s an alcohol thing.
I would throw myself into what was in front of me. I did well in school when I got to college because the social part wasn’t working over there, and this isn’t working over here. My mom is screaming at me and my dad is off. He went abroad or overseas for many years. My sister was one of the cool kids. She got in with this older crowd and I’m her younger brother. That was happening. I threw myself into whatever was in front of me, studying and I got into sports later. I was a late bloomer as well. I didn’t even go through puberty until between my sophomore and junior year of high school, which was late. Guys do it in freshman year and girls even earlier than that. I’m squeaky-voice Will. I grew 7 inches over the course of one summer. My limbs grew fast and I was uncoordinated that I would reach for things and knock them over because I wasn’t expecting them to be 6 inches closer to me. That was not an easy transition, but once I did find my body, it was more in college. I started getting more to sports. I got bigger, stronger, and found my coordination and whatnot, but studying was a big one.
It became your addiction. This is why both of us are into habits, breaking that chain and creating good habits. Let’s talk about that because I know that you talk a lot about momentum. You talk a lot about habits. Share with us about your perspective on habits, and what you are teaching and talking about nowadays regarding habits. Especially as we’re sitting in COVID, this is when you should create a habit. Don’t create the bad ones, create the good ones.
This is such a great opportunity now because habits are one of those things. They don’t care if they’re good or bad or helping or hurting us. They’re going to do their thing. You develop them and a lot of them come earlier. We have our role models, our parents, school, peers, media, news. These days, you’re getting it from every direction from TV and your phone. It’s easy to get caught up societal wise. It’s broken in a lot of ways, and we’re focusing on the wrong things. If you were an alien to come down onto planet Earth and check out our media and stuff, you would think that we were all about looks and money.
Also, the glorification of busyness, who’s busier?
These are all things that are easy to fall victim to. All of a sudden, you’re taking certain actions, you’re doing certain habits that are making you less happy, not building your momentum. You get to young adulthood and it’s like, “I’ve got this habit.” There are some obvious ones that people realize like, “I know I should work out more. I know I should eat better.” There are many that are off the radar of people such as my negative thinking or something as silly as looking people in the eye when I’m speaking to them.
If you didn’t learn that from your parents and you didn’t get that somewhere along the line, how many people have you met when you go to meet them, shake their hand and look away? It’s like, “First impressions are huge.” That’s another universal principle. For better or for worse, it’s what it is. People are going to make an impression of you. If you don’t look someone in the eye, that’s going to hurt your chances of building some relationship or alliance. We need other human beings in our lives. That’s one example.
What’s your perspective on what’s happening with children? You said you have kids, I have grandkids and they’re not getting that social interaction. My kids and my grandkids were here for Thanksgiving and they get along. They are 6, 4 and 2. I was surprised that there wasn’t a lot of fighting. I even said to my son, “I’m surprised that they’re not at each other constantly.” He said, “We are too.” They need that as we do as adults, we needed that as well. What’s your perspective on how this is going to affect the next generation? I don’t think we’re going to see the impact until later.
It’s because we’re spending less time with other people with COVID. We’ll be okay if you develop the right types of habits. It’s going to be easy to go into your own world. People’s homes are becoming more and more of their castles where they’ve got everything they need. They’ve got high-speed internet, eight billion channels to choose from, and service providers for TV. You can get anything you want within two hours delivered to you. If you develop the right habits, even this. We’re not in person, but this is fulfilling my relationship core. You’re a like-minded person. We’re having a nice conversation. I’m feeling your energy. You’re feeling my energy. It counts.
It’s maybe not quite as good as in person. To me, we’re fortunate to be living in an era where technology has gotten to this point when this shift is happening. I do think it’s a big shift that’s happening. Regardless of if we got a vaccine that 100% of people got, the pendulum has already started to shift. It was long or overdue in terms of things like offices employing all these people. For instance, I live in Chicago, I live in a suburb. It’s about a half an hour commute each way. Even though I work from home, fortunately, I’ve been spared that. The majority of my friends and people that I know spend at least 1 to 2 hours a day commuting. They get to the office, they’re checking in, and there’s the water-cooler banter.
At the end of the day, it’s 8 to 10-hour a day and there are four hours tops of productivity from both ends. For both the employer’s end where he’s saying, “I’m paying all this money for all this office space and insurance when they could be at home.” Now, they’re seeing for the first time, “They’re at home, they’re getting as much done if not more so, and as productive.” In a lot of cases, but not everything, not everywhere. From what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen, people are like, “I want to spend the second half of my day playing golf. I know that I have this much amount of work to do. I’m going to be super productive and get it done.” They can do that other thing that they want. It works on both ends, both the employer and the employee. I know the people that have had entered into this and not having to commute. They’re like, “I’m never going back. I don’t care what my job was.”
A lot of people who are reading this too, this is that shift. It’s everything from success to significance, making the impact, and that shift. The sub-title of this show is Life After Breaking Through Glass Ceilings. Those glass ceilings aren’t necessarily financial when I say success, because it’s just the success that everyone has in the glass ceilings. You were contemplating suicide and that’s a glass ceiling or an A-ceiling that you broke through to move your life forward. I’m laughing about it because everything that I’ve been teaching for years is, “What if you could go on vacation every single day of your life? What if you could have so much intention?”
This is where the habits come in. There’s so much intention when you go to work that you get in. You do what you’re supposed to do. You don’t do activities for the sake of doing activities, which for me is like eating soup with a fork. You’re exhausted when you get home, but you think you’ve worked all day, but you’re not fulfilled in any way, shape, or form at all. This has been my story for many years is to get in, do the work, be intentional, be laser-focused, know what you want, create the habits to be that laser focus, and then play every day. Work on purpose to play with passion. Now, if people are doing the right things, they’re finally experiencing that and now realizing, “It’s not what I want to do.”
Let’s talk about these habits again. We know we have bad and good habits. What is the way that someone could get started? Do they just sit down and say, “What are all the habits I have?” and arrow them into the good and bad column? Do we have to assess that so we can create triggers to change the mindset when it comes up? We were talking about Mark Victor Hansen and his beautiful wife, Crystal. I went through one of her meditations on eliminating a trigger of mine and it worked. Now, when that trigger comes up, I’m like, “No, go away, bad trigger.” It’s created another shift for me and a habit. It’s only a degree now, but down the road, that’s a huge change. You can change to one degree. Share with us how we would get started turning the bad habits into good habits, and then we’ll go to how do we work on those habits to make sure that they’re good, strong, and can move us forward.
This is exactly what I do. One of my frustrations that I had over the years as I was this crazy, insatiable, self-help guy. I’d read the same thing twelve different times from twelve different people. I’m like, “Yes.” By the time I read that twelve times and I’ve tried it myself, I’m like, “Everybody’s saying the same thing. It’s coming down to this.” At a certain point, I realized that habits are what it all comes down to. I created what I call My Equation of Life, which I’ve been living off of since college but I didn’t realize it. It took me 25 years to come up with it.
[bctt tweet=”Time is our most precious commodity.” username=””]
It’s your belief system, plus your repeated actions, plus time, equals who you will become. It’s what are the thoughts going through your head? Are you a victim? Are you an owner? What is your mindset? Are you confident? Do you have a good outlook on life? Are you sure that life is out to get you and there’s nothing you can do about it? Hopefully, you’ll hit the lottery one day and you’ll all be safe. Based on these thoughts, you’re going to take certain actions. They should be specific and intentional. You take these actions and the more you take them, the more they turn into what you will hope will become habits. Habits don’t care if they’re good or bad, helping or hurting us. They’re going to do their thing over time.
It’s a step by step one day at a time process. You can’t build a habit in a night. However, some habits you can build in a week, some might take two months. It’s not a simple formula, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be some front-loaded work. If you want to get rid of failure habits and you want to replace it with a success habit, there’s going to be some work involved. The more you do it, then the more it becomes automatic. Your brain is constantly trying to conserve energy. What happens is once that habits form, your brain is like, “I’ve got that one. We don’t need to worry about it.”
It doesn’t take any time. It’s like driving home from work. You have to go that way.
If you brush your teeth. It’s something you do. That’s the point. That’s where you want to get to, and then time does its thing and it all compounds. You’re maybe eighteen years old and you’re able to eat ten cheesesteaks in a sitting and wake up feeling great. If you do that for 30 years and you don’t exercise, let’s see how that plays out. That’s why that equation of life, belief, system, actions, time, who you will become. That all plays out and it’s going to work itself out. These habits that you have, they’re failure habits. It’s all about shining a spotlight on your life. That’s the first thing I help people do. You’ve got to start simple and small. If you try to hit them all at once, you’re going to get overwhelmed and quit because that’s how our minds work.
That’s like new year’s resolutions, “I’m going to work out. I’m going to eat. I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to spend more time with my friends and family. I’m going to get up early,” and nothing works.
Your best is to pick one. Even with one, if you don’t do it consistently. You’ve got to fake it until you make it. You’ve got to set an alarm, get some system going. If you look at my desk, I have my top five habits I’m working on. It’s part of my routine every single morning. A routine is super important as well in the morning especially, to have a successful routine. It’s like, “These are the things that are going to build my momentum and supercharge me for the rest of the day.” I have my top five where I look at them. I remind myself every morning, “These are the ones that are important to me that I want to do.” You’ve got to have that in your life somehow where you’re aware. I’ve gotten to a point where I can see five. You want to start with one and say, “Let’s go to the top three things that are hurting you right now.” If you aren’t quite sure, I have this exercise that I do with people where you flash forward to the end of your life. It sounds a little bit morbid but it sticks with me. It’s called the funeral exercise.
What you do is you pretend like your eulogy is being given at your funeral and what people are saying at you? How many people are at your funeral? Is it your mom or is it a ton of people? They’re saying all these nice things and I even break it down into the core. Your cores are your mindset, relationships, career and finances, physical and emotional health, and giving back. Within each of those, what are the top five things you’d like somebody to say about you? You can take that list and you can build your habits off of that. You say, “This is where I want to end up. This is the habit I have. I need to change that habit. I’m not using that equation of life to help me. It’s hurting me.”
How much does core values? The principles that people have played in assessing core habits. It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to go to my funeral story and I hope that I was a good person. I hope that I gave back.” That exercise, is it in alignment with your core? I sometimes think that if that string isn’t attached to it, regardless of all the paths you have to take to get there, the ups and downs, rounds, and figuring out different ways, that string is still there. It’s a core that you want, not what society gives you that says you need to be a nice person, kind person, a philanthropist, but it has to come from your core in order for it to drive. How much do you work with people on their core values?
That’s why I like the funeral exercise because that forces you if you don’t know what your core values are. I don’t say, “Let’s look at your core values.” I do have an exercise where I say, “Let’s make a list of all your strengths and passions.” It’s like, “These are the things that are important to me and I love. These are the things that I’m good at.” I always tell people, “When it comes to your career, you always want to try to combine those two.” If you want to live your best life, you have to do it. You can do it in another way. As you said, you can eat your soup with a fork. You may get good at it, but it’s never going to quite feel like you’re doing something and you’re making much.
Someone gets his alignment going to the funeral exercise or the strengths, passions, and making those come together, also known as core values in a sense. They’ve got that going on now. What about the assessment of good habits? You have to make sure the good habits don’t stop because of the bad habits that you’re trying hard to make better start overriding them, and then the good habits slide into bad habits again.
That’s where this whole gamification stuff comes in. The whole idea of all this is if you want to live your happiest, healthiest, best, and most awesome life, you need to maintain balance and continually build momentum in each of your courses. To answer your question, I have this little assessment on my website and you can find out quickly where you stand in your cores on a scale of 1 to 5. You’ll quickly see which core you’re weakest in, which you’re strongest in. You always want to start on your weakest one. Let’s say you’ve completely gotten out of a habit of working out. Your career and finances have been taking up all your time and your relationships have been suffering a bit, giving back isn’t even on your radar, your emotional health, you’re stressed. You’re constantly running around.
You’re putting in a lot out. That’s great and it goes back to societal. You would say, “If he sells his company for $10 million, he’s successful.” No, not at the expense of all of these other things. You need to say, “How can I maintain the balance and continually build?” What you want to do and part of what I help people with is I have this strategy that I helped them with. My system is evolving into an app and a game where you’re the rocket ship and these cores are the cylinders of your engine. Each core represents a different one. The idea is you want to maintain balance and continually build momentum.
As you do so, you fly off and you reach the next planet, the next galaxy, and the universe. You’re meeting aliens along the way. You’re dodging through asteroid fields. There are all these little challenges that are coming which all tie into this, but you’re doing it slowly. To answer your original question, if some of them start to fall off the wayside, let’s say all of a sudden, you’re working on your physical health because that was your weakest, but then your career and finance start to suffer. If you have a system in place that’s monitoring them all and you’re aware of where you stand in each, it’s a lot easier to say, “I’ve gone a little too far over this way. I need to figure out a schedule, a routine that gets me more into balance.”
I know you’re using the word balance, and I’m not a fan of the word balance because I feel like it’s 50/50 everywhere. You’re a little here, there and everything. What I like about the gamification is the trigger that increases awareness. I always use the story that, if you’re standing on two boats at the same time, you’re exhausted because you’re trying to balance the boats. No boat gets attention. Let’s call it your family, business, family and health. No one is getting any attention because you’re constantly managing the balance of it. You’re exhausted from doing it. What you’re saying is when you’re doing something like that, the gamification piece of this is the trigger that says, “I’m in a balancing situation that isn’t working for me now. I need to make some decisions on how I want to move forward.”
Let me preface everything with what I’m saying. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s impossible for it to be firing on all cylinders, which is where you want to get to, which you’re killing it. You’ve got at least 4 out of 5 in all five of your areas. You’ve got goals and every day working, moving towards them for each of your areas. It’s impossible to be completely balanced at all. What’s going to happen is you’re going to find your career and finances. You might go through a month to three. Does that take more of your focus because that’s what’s required? You’re trying to start a new business and step it up a little bit. Maybe some of your other cores suffer a little. That’s okay. As long as in the greater scheme of things, you know they’re still there and you’re not completely letting them dissipate. You’re keeping an eye on them and maybe you’re cutting back a little bit. At a certain point then, you want to ride the ship again. If you don’t, then what happens is that’s why it’s easy to all of a sudden you’re like, “I’ll work an extra 1, 2 or 5 hours.” Before you know it, twelve hours a day and your career and finances have been neglected.
You’re not eating and exercising. You’re gaining weight. Many years from now, you’re going to see the results of that. How do you employ gamification? I’ve started a lot of things in COVID. I did the twelve-week year. As soon as we were locked down in March 2020, I said, “The next twelve weeks will be equivalent to a year in my practice.” I accelerated my practice by a year in twelve weeks. I was exhausted because that’s a lot of work. I didn’t want to repeat it over and over. I was like, “What’s another game I can do with myself?” When I’m having my tea in the morning, before I can have a sip of my tea in the morning, I have to do fifteen pushups on my countertop because I have a rotator cuff issue so I can’t be flat.
When I’m here in my office, I have to do a plank. My watch is going off every 50 minutes to say, “Get up, walk around, go outside.” I realign myself with the earth’s megahertz. We’re vibrating at the same energy. I go out and take a walk, get into the earth, even if it’s freezing, raining or whatever, I get out there and do that. I’ve been gratifying everything in COVID. I don’t know how I started. I wasn’t doing what you’re doing. You’re taking it to another level, but if someone’s doing this and they’re saying, “What do I gamify?” Your app isn’t quite out yet, but what are some things that they can do to gamify to create better habits for themselves?
The way I would answer that question is for right now, you want to reduce the friction on any new habit you’re trying to form and/or any bad habit you’re trying to get rid of. We mentioned briefly before we started this interview James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He has this thing that he calls Habit Stacking, which is a way to reduce the friction by doing two habits at once. One doesn’t seem as difficult as the other to develop. Routine is a huge part of all of this, but you want to have a routine that you get in the habit of like any other habit. Once you get in that habit, you can use technology to help you, anything that you can use to reduce friction and make it fun. You get into that routine.
Every time I’m taking a shower in the morning, I step in and I immediately go to my stretches. I tore my ACL in 2019 and my meniscus. The doctor said that it was the worst one he’d ever seen. I blew it out. Because of that, maybe forever I’ll be doing these stretches that I need to do every morning to continue to keep it strong. Stretching makes sure it goes back to where it was. I’m still not 100% there. As I’m doing that, I say my morning mantra. I used to say my morning mantra in the shower without doing that. Now I’ve worked it out to where my stretching and the mantra is the same time period.
[bctt tweet=”Everyone has their own equation of life, composed of your belief systems, repeated actions, and time itself.” username=””]
I’m doing it on autopilot. I’m not even thinking. I get out of the shower and I’ve said my mantra, which is all the things that are most important for me to remember, to continue to build my momentum and do those habits that I’m working on in each of my five cores. In the end, I say what I’m grateful for, which gives me that extra boost to remind me of the 10,000-foot view like, “If something bad happened, who cares? In general, I’m very fortunate.” I come out and I’m ready to go. I go and do another routine, which is I floss. I brush, take my vitamins, use my moisturizer, and these things that become automatic for me.
By the time I’m dressed and I’m ready to go, my engines are revved versus take somebody who’s got a different type of thing. This is all after I’ve had coffee. You think this is gross but for me, I’ve gotten used to it and it doesn’t bother me at all. I make a shake. I have my protein, spinach, coffee, and banana. That way I’m not drinking two separate things, which takes up too much time. I had my sip and then I go through whatever emails require my immediate attention while I’m drinking my coffee, then my brain is awake and then I go into that routine.
It’s interesting because what you’re saying is to create good habits and to eliminate bad habits, they can’t be compartmentalized. As you’re speaking this, I tend to compartmentalize. I’m great with habits. People ask me all the time, “How do you get so much done?” It’s because many things that I do are habits. When you have habits, time is easier. It’s faster. Women can get ready in twenty minutes if they have to. They have a system and a routine, but they always take an hour. If we had to condense the time, because we’ve got our little routine, we can get ready quickly.
It’s Parkinson’s Law. If you have all the time in the world to do something, you’ll take all the time in the world to do it. If you condense it, it would be better. I created a bunch of habits so that things were going to move faster for me. It’s funny that you’re saying this because I’m thinking about how I start my day and I haven’t put the gamification on steroids yet. Not even that, I’m compartmentalizing everything. For example, when I wake up in the morning, I don’t get out of bed until I say all my prayers, then I get out of bed. If I’m going to have my tea, which is not a bad habit, I do my little pushups while it’s being made.
I’m thinking if I want to do some stretching or something a little different and even drinking my tea is compartmentalized. You said you do it when you’re doing your email. It’s not that I want to do that necessarily, but I’m saying that I did my prayer, now I can get up. I make my tea, do my little pushups, now I can have my tea, but I compartmentalize it. I sit and I have my tea. I’m doing some positive discussion. I’m consuming the things that I love to consume, living on 21 acres and listening to animals in the morning and the birds. I’m not doing anything productive.
First of all, success habits you want to be aware of and you want to do more of and figure out, “How do I expand that? How do I move that to something else?” I heard while you’re waiting for your tea to brew, you’re doing your pushups. That alone, you could just be sitting there, but your routine is, “I’m waiting for my tea. I’m going to do my pushups.” Your tea is ready and for you, you said you don’t necessarily want to be doing your emails. I don’t blame you.
I’m an avid reader, but I could read more while I’m drinking my tea instead of reading later.
I don’t know if that’s why you’re having your tea, but if listening to nature, birds, and enjoying what you have, and that’s part of the grateful part of it, that’s a good habit stack in itself. You’re not sitting there looking at Trump and Biden news and making you angry. You’re doing something that’s feeding your soul and making you happier. You come out of that. You’re like, “I’ve had my tea.” Give yourself some credit, but those are the types of things to be thinking of. You don’t want to waste time. Time is our most precious commodity. It flies so fast as you and I are sure can attest.
You don’t want to be eating a cookie and having tea. It’s an a-ha moment for me because there are times where I compartmentalize. Instead of lying in bed saying my prayers, I could be doing something. I could be walking on the treadmill because I’ll use that as an excuse that, “I don’t have time to walk on the treadmill.” I could be doing that. That would create like, “If I’m hell-bent on saying my prayers, which I am.” It’s a good habit, and the problem is getting on that crazy thing for twenty minutes. “It takes me twenty minutes to say my prayers, why can’t I do both?” I want to share that vulnerability because someone is reading this and thinking, “That’s me too, but Jen said it good. I’m going to do both together.”
There are always opportunities there. Even the people that think that they’re killing it, I call them 5 percenters versus 95 percenters.
I’m probably a 5.5% or something and I’m getting there. I know that you have the coaching that you do. I know we can go to your MooreMomentum.com and we can get information, touching base with you, and having you speak at an event. If I were an owner of a company that had everyone coming into an office, and now everyone is scattered around and doing this, I would want you to come to and do a Zoominar with us to help everyone create these wonderful, great habits that they’re going to bring back to the office if we’re going to even open up. I would want you to be speaking at my sales meeting or my rally. Whether it’s your rally, a conference or you want to work with Will personally to overcome these bad habits and say, “That’s it. I’ve had enough. When this COVID cocoon is done, I have the option to either emerge as a butterfly, or I have the option to be all shriveled up and have created all these terrible bad habits.” What is the best way for them to communicate with you and what is it that you’re offering to people?
I’m not taking on one-on-one clients now. I’m happy to have discussions about speaking engagements. I’m putting that at 2 to 3 months in the future. I’ve done speaking engagements. I did that at TEDx and I loved it. Going back to what you are saying with habits is balance, doing one thing at a time, “I’ve got this. I’ve got my goals.” Goals are one of the most important habits that you can have. You’ve got to review your goals every morning because it’s that reminder of, “This is what I’m working towards.”
I like to call them expectations because goals are a little dreamy, “My goal is to have $1 million in my bank account. My expectation is to have $1 million in the bank account,” action.
I won’t go into it now, but I have a whole system to help with that. The gist is you don’t want to have just one generic goal like, “I want to have a zillion-dollar.” You’ve got to be specific. You have the ultimate goal of where you want to end up in life and the types of things like that funeral exercise for your career and finance. I break it down into 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, and immediately like, “What do I need to do today?” That way you see the big picture of, “This is what I want.” You don’t get caught up in just more and more. You have a specific goal you’re working towards.
You’ll have conversations with people about that. Have you ever thought about doing group coaching?
I took it off from my website now. If anybody wants to have me, I can always make time for it. It’s one of those things I’m super passionate about and love. You could reach out to me. Go to my website and go to the Contact page.
You’re expressing a habit here, a habit of not letting people take over your priorities because we can all be yes people, and then we don’t get anything for ourselves.
Saying no is hard to do, especially when you’re trying to grow something. I’m excited and I want to help everybody, but there’s only one of me. I know what I need to get done. Coaching and speaking is a huge part of it. It’s one of my pillars. I have these five pillars of this plan that I’m developing out. Revamping the educational system is also another big one. We have got to change what we’re teaching kids in school in terms of these things like we’re talking about, habits, cores, doing the types of things that are going to lead to happening. It’s not just focusing on Math, Science, Algebra. I remember taking Trig 3-AP and it’s like, “What did that do for me?” There is value and I don’t mean to take that away.
It’s a movement that Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi are doing right now of being a knowledge broker. It’s all about knowledge now. That’s why all the podcasts that are out there are becoming bigger and better because everyone wants this knowledge. You can’t always get it behind the desk in a classroom. We already know that at colleges, the enrollment is down and it’s not to shake that because I went to college too, but it’s that we need to apply all this stuff that we’re learning in a way that makes us better human beings. We have so much potential.
[bctt tweet=”Try to start simple and small. If you try to hit them all at once, you’re going to get overwhelmed.” username=””]
I’ve gotten out of these two small children, I’ve got two boys, eighteen months and four and a half. The thought of them when they get to young adulthood where I was in college, as I described it here, my rock bottom, the confusion, and wishing I’d had all this knowledge early on. My whole thing is I want to get it as early on as possible because remember, those habits dig in deep and they’re hard to unclench, but once you do, it’s easy. The earlier you start, the better chances you have of getting those right ones set up to begin with, and then you’re off to the races from an early age.
Also, change patterns that happen in the past. That’s what my husband and I wanted the whole time that we’ve been married for many years. We wanted to change the patterns given to us, DNA’d to us or not, the circumstances that were given to us. It’s important to do that. I feel strongly that we’ve done that. It’s been an absolute pleasure meeting with you again, Will. I appreciate you taking a little more time than we normally do on a show. This is a hot topic that we’re sitting around. We might as well do something with the time. We might as well create good habits, so we can better people on the other side of this. I appreciate all the wisdom that you’ve given us. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jen. This has been great. To piggyback on what you said, this is an opportunity now because you’re getting out of your normal routine. Whether it’s going to work or whatever it is. Now all of a sudden, things are different and it’s this chance to say, “Let’s take a good hard look at what’s going on in my life. What’s working? What’s not working? Where do I want to be?” Start intentionally setting some of these habits. Remember, start small if you try to do too big.
Thank you for those words at the very end here. I appreciate it. If you want to connect with Will, go to MooreMomentum.com. I want to say thank you for joining us. For readers, thank you for taking time out of your day to read something that hopefully will propel you into further greatness in your life. As he’s doing with his rockets, aliens, and gamification, we can’t wait until the app comes out.
If you go on the website, you go to the gamification tab, and you can sign up to get advance notice when the app comes out.
Please give us a great rating. Write a review for us. We love hearing all of that information. If you know someone that’s had a great change in their life, and now they’re doing good in the world, please let me know. I’d love to have that opportunity to interview them as well. We’ll catch you next time.
Important Links
- How to Win Friends & Influence People
- Atomic Habits
- Habit Stacking
- MooreMomentum.com
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About William “Will” Moore
Will Moore, an honors graduate from Rollins College, is a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, life coach, and happiness expert. His #1 mission in life is to gamify the process of personal wellness so that people become addicted to becoming the happiest and best version of THEMselves – in turn paying it forward to help the world become the best version of ITself.
After exiting his delivery startup for a combined nine-figure sum in 2019, Will redefined his definition of “success.” He confirmed what he already knew – that our happiness doesn’t come from sitting on a beach drinking Pina Coladas all day, but from understanding what makes us TRULY happy at our core, then taking action on those things every day.
Will has been honing his system over the last 25 years since hitting his rock-bottom in college, where he serendipitously discovered a book that opened his eyes to universal principles that have been around since the beginning of mankind and will be around till our end. He made a commitment to discover and implement as many of these principles as he could on his quest to discover what it means to have deep, soul-filling happiness.
Over the years, Will became an insatiable self-help beast devouring as much material as he could, and using himself as his own human science experiment to test in real-time what worked, what didn’t, and how to incorporate those universal truths he was uncovering. After many iterations, his universal system to help ANYONE become the best version of themselves is finally here.
Will has always had a knack for timing and seeing things before they catch fire.
– He did it in the early/mid-2000s with the real estate market, building his own passive income-generating portfolio he still holds today, then becoming the #1 sales consultant for the top land company in the country.
– He then saw the writing on the wall with the housing bubble and in 2008 abruptly quit his job to start his next venture, Doorstep Delivery, centering around a new device that he saw was a game-changer for delivering food – the iPhone.
Today, a will is working to revolutionize the process of gamifying self-improvement. With the goal of when the user levels up on the screen, they’re also leveling up in REAL LIFE!
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