Episode 122 - William Moore - Leaders On Leadership
Running a business is and will always be unpredictable, given the overall state and the changing trends of the market. With that in mind, a good entrepreneur must understand when to stay in the game and when letting go is the most profitable decision. Dr. Tracey Jones interviews William Moore to share how he read the writing on the wall when doing business in real estate and food delivery, allowing him to quit at just the right time and before everything gets worse. He talks about the challenges he had working with business partners and how his fraternity experience opened his eyes to the importance of self-care. William also gives a peek at the application he and his team are currently developing to bring out the full potential in everyone.
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William Moore - Leaders On Leadership
My guest is Will Moore. Will is the Founder of The Momentum Movement. He is a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, life coach and happiness expert. After exiting his delivery startup for a nine-figure sum, Will realized that true success is not about finances, but nurturing and finding balance in the five core areas of life. He's now dedicated his life to helping others discover what these areas are and how to replace the failure habits built into each of what he calls The Success Habit. His main goal is to help others build momentum every day so they can fire on all cylinders on their way to becoming an unstoppable force and pay it forward to the rest of the world to do the same. Will, I love that. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Thank you. I realized my bio is probably a little long. I'm going to shorten that a little bit, but I’ve got so much I want to get in there. That was nice and that does sum it all up. The only thing I realized isn't in there is the gamification aspect, which we'll get into how I tweaked at all to everything that I'm doing. You’ve got to stand out these days. You’ve got to do something different but you don't want to do something different only to be different.
One thing that I've always been interested in is addiction. My mom was an alcoholic on the bad side of it, but then, on the good side of it, the good news is habits don't care if they're good or bad or helping hurting us. Addictions don't care. If you're addicted, you're addicted. There is a way to use science and tech to become addicted in a good way to help yourself level up in the world and that's part of what I'm trying to do along with this app that I'm developing.
I can't wait to hear about that because we're going to talk about these four keys in paying the price of leadership. Loneliness is neither good nor bad. It's how it hits you. It’s the same with abandonment and weariness. There's good tired and there's exhaustion. I want to definitely unpack that and I want to hear maybe when we talk about vision, how you're getting increased clarity on where to take your singularity to the next level.
Will, I'm excited to unpack, pick your brain about all these great things because it sounds like you've been through a lot of things. I've never met a great person with an easy past. Our readers out there, love reading about the bloody noses, the bloody knuckles, and the fight getting into the fray. My dad wrote a speech called The Price of Leadership decades ago. He was pragmatic about leadership. He loved leadership but he's like, “It is a daunting task but it's the only thing that makes life worth living.”
One of the things that he talked about in The Price of Leadership is a term called loneliness. We all heard that it's lonely at the top. I think Michael Scott in The Office doesn’t like being a leader because then you're separated, but can you tell me what loneliness has meant for you and your journey? Maybe give us a word of edification and exhortation for some of our readers that may be in a season of loneliness?
If you want to talk about scars and bruises, I interview people as well, read a ton of books, and have been to seminars. There's an amazing theme between most people that I call hitting your rock bottom. You’re getting to a point that's bad that you've got nowhere else to go. There's a bad choice which is maybe ending your life. I got to that point in my life at one stage or bouncing up. I call it my rock bottom bounce. I hit mine in college.
My mom was an alcoholic and I mention it briefly. She was physically and verbally abusive and my parents got divorced early. We moved around a lot. I was always the outsider. By the time I got to college, I had zero self-confidence. I was your typical victim. I was sure that life was out to get me, that there was nothing that I could do about it. My brain was broken. If you want to talk about loneliness, I remember specifically, the night of fraternity bids. I’m not sure if everybody's familiar with that concept but in America, when we go to college, there are fraternities and sororities. I put all my hopes and dreams, “If I could get into a fraternity, I would be accepted and normal.”
Looking back now, that was the wrong type of mindset to have but at that time it was like, “I'll be accepted.” I'll never forget the day the bids came and everybody in my hall, all the freshmen, almost every guy that rushed got one, and I didn't get a bid. No fraternity wanted me. I'll never forget crying and locking my door so nobody could see how embarrassed and ashamed I was. I remember hearing the guys running up and down the hall screaming, yelling and celebrating. There were even a couple of knocks on my door. I just hid. That was one of the worst moments of my life. I felt completely alone at that time.
How did you take that? When did you come out of this and realize that joining a fraternity is not going to fill that? Were you raised with your mother? When your parents divorced, did you stay with her?
Mostly. My dad went on a trip around the world for about five years. He came back and they lived in the vicinity so I would see him from time to time. He was part of my life, so that was nice. In terms of what happened here, serendipitously, my rock bottom bounce came in the form of one of my professors who is in college that freshman year I was telling you about, who I admired tremendously happened to on the side mention, “There's this book I read called How to Win Friends and Influence People years ago by Dale Carnegie. It changed my life. It restructured the way I looked at things.” He was this idol of mine. This guy was garrulous in the way he taught. He wanted to learn from him and I was like, “How does somebody get this much confidence? How does someone get this outlook on life?”
I immediately rushed to the school library right after. I remember being grateful that they happen to have the book. It was small in the Self-Help section in the library at the time. I devoured it. Something clicked, where I was like, “There's a different way to look at the world. There are these universal principles that I haven't been aware of. If I start learning more of them, following them, and testing these out, maybe I can become more these types of people I'm reading about.” I did. I used myself as a human science experiment one step at a time.
How to Win Friends & Influence People
I became this insatiable self-help beast reading book after book, learning, absorbing, taking crazy notes. If you want to talk about notes, I literally have thousands of pages of notes and books. Thank God the iPhone came out and now they all go on my phone. They go into my computer and that's part of why I'm putting my book together. It’s like, “Universal principles been around since the beginning of time. They've been around until the end. You can't cheat the system.”
Especially in this day and age, it's tough to know what to pay attention to, what to listen to, and what to base your actions on. That’s what I've made as one of my goals. It’s to figure out what these are in each of your five core areas and what are the habits that you've developed that revolve around these. Are you doing the opposite as one of your habits and it's hurting you? Is it building negative momentum? Have you developed a habit that centers around principle and you're building positive?
When I started doing that, I started noticing real differences and gaining a friend at a time, and being more comfortable in my own skin. It doesn't happen overnight. If anybody tells you that for $12.99 they’ll save you an elixir life to make you this confident awesome person, that’s not how it works. It’s step by step, day by day, and taking the actions. It helped that I was confident that these things will work. For instance, Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People, it's not rocket science. The gist is don't get on your own. Take it off of you. It's not about you, it's about the other person. Make the other person feel special, important, and help them to achieve their goals. The more you give, the more you're going to get back. You'll never have any problems with friends and allies’ relationships.
It’s simple yet, how many people don't follow that rule? How many people talk about themselves, don't look in the eye, doing their own thing, and don't even realize that, “You're making me feel I don't exist?” Those are the people that nobody wants to hang with. Society is still amazing. That's a whole other subject. They don't teach this stuff in schools. A lot of it, you’ve got to figure it out on your own. It's amazing that that's not the main curriculum. I started doing that and I was like, “It's not about me. I'm going to make people fit in.” I started using these little tricks and all of a sudden, people wanted to come to my room and talk to me. People wanted to hang out with me at lunch. I was like, “All I'm doing is listening and asking questions.”
Millions of people have read that book and it didn't do it for them. My mom always says this, “You have the ability to absorb.” That absorptive capacity meant you were able to transform yourself and take it in and self-assess accurately, put down the victim card and say that. I know this teacher modeled that, so what made you open to the fact, “I can change. I don't have to go try and change everybody else?”
I tell people, “Nobody changes anybody. All you can do is change yourself.” The more you change yourself, the more you're going to notice these things opening up and people coming to you so you watched him. Is there anything else that you saw because it sounds there was some tough stuff in the beginning but you said you bought into that victim mentality? What else do you think made you all of a sudden wake up and be open to the fact that you don't have to live this way? There are people that take their last breath still in that victim state. What do you think it was with you?
By the way, I have evolved it into what I call a fixed victim versus a growth owner. The five cores centered around mindset as the main one. If you don't get your mind working for you instead of against you, through your perception, attitude, confidence, the flash have all happened to you. If you're that victim in life that says, “Poor me. My brain is broken and there's nothing I can do about it. I’ll hope to survive or hit the lottery.” When you're a victim, it’s like, “If I can get into that fraternity then my life will be all magical.” Not to get into politics, but there are certain leaders out there that prey on us and they use the fear and that mentality of, “You better go with us because we’ll take care of you. I'll make sure that your life is going to be awesome if you vote for me.” That's not how it works. That’s broken. You’ve got to do it yourself. It's good to have a leader that's in line with your values and your cores.
That’s value congruence.
Nobody can fix your life but yourself. I became an insatiable self-help beast. After that book, I picked up the next, and the next after that. I'm learning all these things. Once I'd read it 3 or 4 different times, I tried it out in my own life and I saw that it worked. I call them total truth. That's a total truth that I can hang my hat on and I don't have to guess that's right. Knowing it's a total truth gave me the confidence to use it confidently, whatever that principle was every time such as looking people in the eye. It's such an easy and simple thing. It shows that you're connecting with that person and it goes back to making them feel special and important. That's the one that a lot of people never develop. To me, it's obvious. When I meet somebody who doesn't look me in the eye, I immediately can tell you where their mindset is.
You conquered this as you're in your college mode. How about you stepping off into business? Tell me about that little journey as you start stepping into the mantle of leadership and owning your own life. Can you talk about a season of loneliness that maybe you went through professionally?
Ironically, before, I figured things out in stages. As I was learning and growing, one of the things that I became dead set on was I'm going to become filthy stinking rich that people are going to absolutely be like, “How can we ever be mean to that person?” It’s the old revenge story.
It is the old revenge success.
Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century (Think and Grow Rich Series)
That drove me. Speaking of other books, I was reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It helped change my view of money. It's more than money. I would highly recommend that to people. It's a mindset book. I also read When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. That talked about passive income, how to build it and how the wealthy get wealthier because of the way they look and handle their money, which is letting it in. As what we were talking about, compound on top of itself one step at a time, don't get greedy, don't go to the home run, get real estate, and get something that's earning money on the side, stocks, whether you're working for it or not.
I started to develop this entrepreneurial mindset and that's when I started my real estate business first. I have these rental properties from my alma mater in colleges. I was renting it out to college kids and I was building this up. I had this opportunity to sell land and I got into this insane job, which is a story unto itself. It is crazy. It was essentially modern-day Far and Away, which a movie with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. I don't know if you've ever seen it.
They were in Australia, is that the one?
It was set in the US. It might have started in Australia and they came to the US. They were immigrants. It was around the 1800s when they were giving the land away. The end scene is basically them, the gist of it is, they're all rushing on horseback. The US was giving land away at that time because there was too much and they were trying to settle the West. The guy would shoot his gun and go, “Go,” and everybody had a stake in their hand with a little flag on it. They had these parcels cordoned off. Whoever got there first with their horse and put their stake in the ground got that land for free. That's how the West was settled. It's amazing and interesting.
My company did something similar, but instead of horses, it was SUVs. Instead of a gun, it was a walkie-talkie and the boss saying, “Go.” We lined up in these SUVs because it was all off-roading. Our company bought these huge parcels of land and essentially cordon them off into chunks of 5, 10, or 20-acre parcels. We were giving it away for free. We were selling them, but it was this frenzy. This was right in the middle of the real estate boom.
You couldn't throw a dart without making money on real estate. If people would show up with 100 people, maybe only ten parcels, so there was this frenzy. Whoever got there, put their SOLD sticker instead of a flag. Whoever put it on the parcel side first, that was their lot. We took them back to the tent, wrote them up and we had a banker there that did the loan and all that. It was insane. The customers were fighting each other for lands.
There were people hiding. One time, this woman hid in the woods because she wanted to get there the night before and get the parcel she wanted. When they said, “Go,” she popped out and pretended she was in one of the cars and put it on but she got caught. It wasn’t truly safe. Real estate developed into that. I quit that when I saw the writing on the wall when the real estate market crashed. It was about to crash and everybody's like, “You're crazy. We're making all this money.” I was the number one sales consultant.
In my first year, I won a brand-new Range Rover which was the top prize. That's how much money this company was making. I quit my second year. A year and a half in, they're like, “You won top salesman, why would you leave?” I'm like, “Trust me, this thing is coming to an end. What do people need? What's the next big thing?” To me, we were stuck in an office for 12 to sometimes 15 hours a day and the only food we were able to get was pizza or Chinese. I'm a healthy guy. I'm working out. I need something better than that. I want my sushi or Panera, but I couldn't get it.
I was like, “I'm going to create it,” so that's what I did. I grabbed my best friend and I worked with him. At first, he was like, “There's no money in it.” I convinced him and he came with me. We started doorstep delivery. Your favorite restaurants delivered to your doorstep, which people now know the concept. It’s Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and that type of thing. We began this journey. We started way before those guys, by the way. Those guys weren't even on the radar. They came out around halfway to the last quarter of when we were in business.
When they did come around, I knew that the party was over with real estate. We can't compete with these billion-dollar companies. We're self-funded. We did this ourselves and bootstrapped. These guys are coming into our territories intentionally losing money to gain market share. We are grabbing our customers and restaurant, so we got to exit. That’s what we did. I put my pedal to the metal and I reached out. My partners were like, “No, we can beat this. We've got a good head start.” I was like, “No, we can't.” I alone went in and said, “We're doing it.” I connected with the guy. Long story short, we ended up merging with them. We raised money and grew by buying other smaller restaurant delivery services around the country. We got big enough to get on the radar of a bigger player called Waitr Holdings out of Louisiana and they purchased us for $321 million in 2019.
Congratulations, that's incredible. How long was that whole exit strategy until you realized, “This is what's going on?”
It is a three-year journey.
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
I love that you said that. Leadership is a future vision. In everything, there's a season. When you said, “The party is over,” there's a difference between quitting and knowing when to let go. You hit that up and it's tough because you birthed and grew this, but there's a season for everything. That's great for leaders reading out there the time when you do say, “It's time to move on.”
It's hard. You get emotionally attached to a business and it was hard because it’s your baby. That’s what happened to some of my partners. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy for me either. At the same time, I flashed forward three years, and I was like, “This story is not going to end well. They're going to slowly put us out of business. We're going to be worth nothing. If we don't sell now and get a good chunk of change for our business, they'll put us out of business and we'll be worth nothing.”
It's that now or never. That loneliness is almost a professional emptiness syndrome. Your baby is gone. That's the natural cycle of things. I'll hear more about what you've done since then. Loneliness, thank you so much for unpacking that. The next thing that my dad talks about is weariness. You sound like you're an intense guy. You’ve got a lot on your plate. You talked about health and eating well. How do you stay refreshed? How do you combat weariness, Will? How do you work with that?
Do you mean physically, emotionally or mentally?
All of it. There are all different aspects of being an entrepreneur. I was in big bureaucracies for twenty years before I picked up my entrepreneurial mantle. It's a different kind of exhaustion and stress. I much prefer entrepreneurial stress to bureaucratic stress. It's much more palpable to me, but what does weariness mean for you in this journey and how do you combat it?
That reminds me of what you said. I remember hearing a quote, and I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect of, “An entrepreneur is the only person that will scoff at working 30 hours a week to work 100 hours a week like, ‘Don't give me that 9:00 to 5:00 job. Let me do it my way.’” There's something to be said for that because, to your question, when you're passionate about something, you've got this burning desire inside. It's amazing how much you can push yourself. We all think that we can only go here, but humans have proven over and over again that we can go here. It's that low hanging fruit.
It's hard, especially nowadays, where you can get anything you want with the click of a button, including your food delivered. I was part of that movement but now it's like, “Now that it's becoming easier to be sedentary, to sit around and to have everything given to us, you have to make an effort to stay active and keep going, whether it's moving physically like having an exercise routine that all that gets your mind going. That's super important. You’ve got to have a routine and get moving 3 to 5 times a week, whatever it is.”
I used to go to the gym, but I had to pivot when COVID hit. I’ll play paddle, I'll play golf, and I'll work out in the backyard with my kids. We have a bike downstairs and some weights. Ideally, whatever it is that you're doing, you don't want it to be an uphill friction-reducing event. If you hate running, don't put, “I'm going to run three times a week,” on your schedule. Figure out what it is that you enjoy doing, what gets you moving. For me, it used to be basketball, and I had to pivot. My kids hop on my back.
When I do pushups, I get more out of the pushups and I'm lifting, and they love it. They think it's too big but I'm getting my shoulders done. I've turned it into a habit stacking multi-core event where I'm building momentum with my physical and my relationship core at the same time. Back to your question on stagnancy, how do I make sure that I keep the energy? It comes back to when you wake up every day. Are you like, “Yes?” There are always going to be days when you're like, “Today, I’ve got to do this.” In general, do you like what you're doing every day? Is it incorporating your strengths and your passions? That is what is able to give you that energy.
I love that you said, “The habit stacking.” When you had to negotiate with people when you saw the writing on the wall and they didn't, how did you work on that? That's tiring when you can see it. Part of being a leader or an entrepreneur, we tend to see things that other people don't or either can't or they don't want to see. How did you work your way through that? Was that a difficult process trying to negotiate with your partners for those who are entrepreneurs? I've never had a partner so I always have a good talk with myself, and we would get along our way. How did you have the stamina to negotiate that?
That was a big challenge. There were four of us in the end. At first, it was me and my buddy, who I told you from real estate. We joined two other guys and they weren't even in the same city as us. Sometimes when you're able to all get in a room, it becomes a lot easier than when you're talking on the phone. It's tougher and this was before Zoom and all this stuff, so there wasn't the video calling for a lot of this stuff. There were two guys that did not want to sell. The friction was dragging a parachute with an anchor attached to it. It was difficult.
This ties back to my other answer that I was able to pursue because I believe wholeheartedly that this was the way. I was like, “I know in my heart that this is what we have to do,” and I refuse to take no for an answer. I was able to persuade them and they said okay. They weren't doing anything proactive for it and I started making outbound calls and I connected with this one guy from Bite Squad out of Minneapolis that we ended up merging with. When I brought the deal to them, I was like, “This is my plan and this is how we can do it.” They were like, “We'll explore this.” It built momentum. It was introduced and it was like, “This might work,” and the deal sold itself because it all started to make sense.
Part of the things with weariness, if you read my dad's book, The Price of Leadership, he said, “You're going to be surrounded by some people that aren't doing their part and other people that do more.” It sounds like even with titans in industry entrepreneurs, they were taken more of a passive loss, a fair thing, sit back and wait and see but somebody has to step up and make it happen. Otherwise, you have nothing.
Letting Go: You may pivot along the way, but it's important to know where you want to end up.
Going back to that growth-owner mindset, you’ve got to have that and say, “I'm going to let my partner figure it out.” That's not the right way to go.
For leaders out there, everybody in your team has to be all in. A lot of times when you're a founding member or something, you get people that are in it for when it's time to cash out or they're going to sit there. It’s like what you said. It’s your locus of control, this growth mindset. For leaders out there, I'd recommend if you are looking to collaborate or partner, make sure that you share that and you're into growing and not sitting back and waiting for the millions of dollars to come in. Otherwise, as competitive as the marketplace is now with globalization and stuff, there's no guarantee. One day you're a millionaire or billionaire and the next day, you're not.
That’s loneliness and weariness. The next thing my father talked about was abandonment. Typically, abandonment has a negative sting to it, but he always talked about abandonment as, “I need to stop thinking about what I like and want to think about in favor of what I ought and need to think about.” For him, it was more of a hyper-focus on your driving vision, all the things you've been talking about. Can you unpack for me how you get focused on the mission and how you stay on point? As entrepreneurs, we tend to be bright shiny objects, FOMO, and I can do it all. How do you stay on point, Will?
Goals have always been something that I got into early. A lot of schools don't even teach you about goals. People hear about them but it's like, “I should probably do that.” How many people do you know that set them? I don't remember getting a structure in school. Early on, that should be taught and ingrained in us. If you want to get somewhere, you’ve got to set a goal. That goal may change. You may pivot along the way and how you get there may not be at all how you thought you got there. It's important to know where you want to end up, at least for your current self.
The reality of it is if you set goals and you have some self-discipline, it increases the chances of you getting to where you want to go by a million-fold. Anybody that sets goals and achieves them will tell you that versus being like, “I want more. I want more money. I want a better job.” How are you going to get there? Be specific. Versus, “This is my five-year plan. This is my one-year plan. This is my six-month plan. In the next 30 days, this is what I'm going to do.” You have a list of the things you're going to do and you prioritize these.
It's not intuitively obvious with goals. How far off do you throw your goals? Do you go as far as five years? Is it more esoteric?
I have an ultimate goal. It sounds a little morbid but I call it my funeral list. I have a funeral list and I help people that I work with. In each of my cores, what I want to be said about me at my funeral. What do I want to achieve with my mindset, relationships, career, finances, physical health, my emotional health, and giving back? In each one of these areas, I have goals set in them. I usually do it by three. I do a three year and I say, “Where in three years do I need to be to be on track with that?” I do one year, six months, and then I do 30 days. Once a week, I force myself to look at the ultimate goals and the longer-term goals because it's easy to get off track. It's easy to see that FOMO, shiny object over here. If you have goals and you know where you want to end up, it becomes a lot clearer and easier to make the decisions that will lead you there versus like, “Do I take a left? Do I take a right? I don't know.” It makes it easier to make those.
I love that you brought up the funeral list. We do that epitaph exercise all the time. It’s like you said, “I want to live a great life.” “What do you mean? Define great.” That depends on a lot of different things, your coding, your moral compass, who knows? I read How to Win Friends and Influence People before The Poky Little Puppy. This was around me from an early age. Still, it was all about positivity. It was never about defining the end goal. It wasn't until I got in the military where you have to have the objective. You’ve got to know what you're going to take. You think that's obvious, but it's not. I appreciate you saying that. I can remember my dad telling me, “When you write down your goal, you're already halfway there.” I'm like, “What?” That's because I wasn't a goal writer downer. Thank you for helping reinforce that, especially with honing your focus.
Here's another reality in terms of goals that people need to get. It's not that you're setting this ultimate goal and you're going to get there and then you're going to be like, “I did it,” sit on a beach and drink a piña colada. That's not how we're programmed. We're programmed to keep moving. Moore Momentum is my whole thing, building more momentum. We're programmed to keep going and keep moving. When you reach a goal, you’ve got to set another one. You set a bigger and higher one. Some people may think that sounds depressing because it's like, “What are you saying? I'm never going to be happy?” It's like, “No. You're missing the point. It's the journey in getting there that keeps you alive and it gives you that soul-filling.” You reach a goal and it does feel great but then it's like, “Okay.” You can't sit around. What's another goal? I hit that outrageous goal I didn’t think I was going to hit.
I interviewed Ben Saunders on my podcast. They call him Polar Bear Ben. He's got the world record for trekking across the Antarctic, 1,800 miles with just skis and no equipment and no snowmobile. He spent ten years getting to that goal. When he got to that goal, he said that it was a little bit depressing at first. He was like, “It felt great but then it was like, ‘Now, what?’” It hit him. He was like, “What's my next goal?” Then he was back.
The fire in the belly. I love that we are coded. The journey is what keeps you alive. That's why a lot of people, five years after retirement, are dead. I was in the military and if you retired, it was this weird thing. A couple of years later, you go to the doctor feeling bad, and then that was it. You are done. It's something about our bodies that’s not meant for that.
Letting Go: We're programmed to keep going and keep moving. When you reach a goal, set a bigger and higher one.
That's how we're built. That's another one of those universal principles I was telling you. You’ve got to accept that. There's no cheating the system. It's been around since the beginning of mankind. It will be around until we destroy ourselves. Learn that one and utilize it. Don't ignore it.
This last one is on vision. A lot of people will sit there and go, “I'm not Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t have the vision.” My father always said, “Vision is seeing what needs to be done and doing it.” I hear a lot of threads of that. You can see what needs to be done and then you make it happen. How do you keep pivoting your vision to the next big thing? Pick me up from when you sold that business to how you reshaped your vision to what you're doing now.
I'm sure a lot of it has come from these books that I've read that have forced me to look at life from a 10,000-foot view. I use that term a lot. I love that term. Anybody that's seeing their hand in front of their face and that's as far as it goes, you're going to have a tough time pivoting and getting to the next stage of where you want to go. It’s like I did with real estate, I was like, “This party is about to end.” People were like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “While our phones were ringing off the hook, all of a sudden, we're getting zero calls. Part of our business model is that we get all these people there and it's a frenzy and we sell out like that.”
Sure enough, the next event we had, four people showed up and they were lollygagging around and nobody bought anything because that whole FOMO was not there, fear of missing out. It is the same thing with the delivery business, I was looking ahead. Where are we headed as a society? What do I like? What’s something important to me that I can't get? That's always a great way to start a business or do something. Don't try to guess other people. Look at yourself and say, “I want it.” I wanted food delivered at the office and I couldn't get the type of food I wanted. I was like, “I guarantee you that there are a lot of other people in my same boat.” I felt strongly about it. My core was like, “I'm going all-in on it.”
Similar towards the end, when I saw Amazon, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, these billion-dollar companies starting to open up in our markets and little old us started from the ground up and bootstrapped the thing with our own money. I was like, “I don't see this industry going away, but I see us getting gobbled.” We’re making money. I was making a living off of it. These other companies were losing billions of dollars a year to gain market share. At a certain point, it's not realistic.
I took that pause and it wasn't immediately. I've been this crazy note-taker my whole life. I've had all these notes. I've been using my own guide for success, principles, ways, and systems for doing things. I thought, “Now I've got these two.” Especially when I had Wyatt. I had him and I'm like, “I’ve got to, at least, have some guide for him and don't make the same mistakes I did.” There are tons of people that are out there that think the same way I did and are still in that victim stage. I tried to start earlier, the young adults. My goal is to start at the preschool level and have books and start incorporating these principles into their lives. In the public education system to where it's mainstream versus not to get lucky that your mom bought a book that has good principles and whatnot. You happen to have parents that have good universal principles that you take after. That's a big part of our influence.
Unfortunately, a lot of us don't have the best role models. What ends up happening? We mimic. We’re like little parrots. We do what they do. Getting this stuff as early as possible. That's where it all springboard from and I was like, “I've been working on this book for years. I'm going to finish this book.” The app was serendipitous. I felt like it was on par with the real estate and the delivery business. It’s like, “With this, the next big thing coming is going to be wellness.” People are realizing like, “Yes, it's cool to want to become the best version of myself,” versus there's still a bit of a negative stigma with self-help like, “What's wrong with you?”
I'm coaching a couple of students from my alma mater and they use the word to try hard and hardo. This one kid was reading all these books and he's doing all the right things. Some of his fraternity brothers are like, “Why are you trying so hard? What are you, a hardo?” I was like, “Wow.” That took me back to my college days. There are always going to be haters. There are always going to be the people that are trying to keep you from going up because that means that they're down there and they don't want to be left in the dark. They try to make you feel bad and guilty about it. I'm trying to change the whole gamification of making it fun and cool to be the best version of yourself. When somebody says that to you, you can look at them in the eye and be like, “Why aren't you trying to be the best version of yourself? I’m not a hardo. What's wrong with you?” Be confident in saying it.
The App, it's using this addictive technology that we've learned. These developers and whatnot, they used it to get us addicted sometimes in the wrong ways to make money for their companies. Using it in a good way so that when you level up on the screen, you're leveling up in real life as well. That's what The App does. You're a rocket ship. You've got these five cores, which are the cores of your engine, the cylinders of your engine. The idea is you want to be firing on all cylinders. How do you do that? You develop the right habits. Each of them, you stop the bad habits. You fly to different planets, different galaxies. You're meeting different little alien species and learning lessons from them. You're battling asteroid fields. It's going to be neat.
You said it's an actual game. Is it going to be a gaming thing?
It's going to be an app. If you look at apps out there for habits, they all feel like homework. I've looked at all of them. To me, it's not a habit app. At the core and the gist of it, it's changing your behaviors and holding yourself accountable in a fun way.
While I was in the military, no lesson was learned until behavior was changed. You can read every book in the world. If you don't internalize it and apply it, you just have it up here. What's the schedule for that? When is that due to come out?
We've been working on the pre-development. We started development. I've developed an app before with my previous business. It took longer but we didn't do as much pre-development. I'm hoping that we'll be able to stick to the timeframe. You can go to my website. There's a way to pre sign-up for the app so that when it's ready, you'll be notified.
Letting Go: Your habits don't care if they're helping or hurting you.
I want to do that before we get to the website and stuff. Is there anything else that you want to share? You've taken us through a unique perspective on your journey. You have been paying the price of leadership. Anything else you want to leave with our readers? Any other final lessons or thoughts?
Remember that you are your habits and your habits are you. Habits don't care if they're good or bad, helping or hurting you. It's super important to take a look at your life. I break it down into five courses because I like the simplicity of it. It covers all the main areas of your life. You say, “Where do I stand in each?” Do that funeral exercise. “Where do I want to end up? What's the disparity? I'm here. This is where I want to be. What are the habits that I currently have?” I call them failure habits for success habits. What are the failure habits I can eliminate and I need to eliminate? What are the success habits I need to replace them with?
You don't want to go too big at a time. You want to start small. If you try to do too many habits at once, you get frustrated and you give up. Once you get them working for you and you're able to unclog those dug in deep, bad habits, failure habits and replace it with that success habit, in the same way, that the other one was building negative momentum on autopilot, the new one is building positive momentum. In the background, your brain is conserving energy and be like, “We’ve got this one. This is something we could do.”
An example would be I would recite my mantra to myself every single morning when I'm in the shower and I have it stacked up with doing my stretches. I tore my ACL and my meniscus so I have to do these stretches every morning. At first, I was like, “This sucks.” It was like, “Okay.” I combine it with my mantra. It doesn't even feel like work. It's part of my routine. I do it every time and automatically when I get in the shower. I come out. I'm stretched. I feel good physically. Mentally, I'm ready to take on the world with my mantra. I repeat the things that I want to remind myself and the important areas of my life that I'm working on to build that momentum. That's the gist.
Thank you so much for that. Will, how can our readers stay in touch with you, learn more about you and sign up for that crazy, new app coming?
MooreMomentum.com is the website. Also, @5CoreLife on Instagram. We have over 400,000 followers. I’m constantly doing video sharing and sharing of information. We have inspirational stories. I interview a lot of great people as well. That's the best way. On the website at Moore Momentum, there's a Core Life Evaluator Quiz. It's a simple, free little quiz you can take. It will give you a quick snapshot of where you're strongest and weakest. It asks you certain questions for each core and you figure out what habits you need to work on first and what to prioritize. For instance, you might be already having a good workout schedule and eating well. Maybe physical health core isn't the one you want to start off. Let's say you're estranged from your family and you don't have good solid relationships and you don't have any friends, maybe relationship core is the one you want to start on.
I love how you divvy that out into the different areas. Even in leadership literature, you can't put an organization through fifteen different goals at the same time. Pick one. I love how you pointed it out. There’s going to be something that you're good in that you don't have to attack them first. Pick the one that you want to and then take it from there. Thank you, Will. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. I'm a big note taker too. I've been scribbling down tons and tons. I have to write it down when I hear it. It's how I work.
Look at a lot of the people that did well. Even Matthew McConaughey who did a cool interview on Tim Ferriss, he's a huge note taker. That doesn't surprise me. He's a deep thinker. The physical act of writing things down does help to cement it in your mind, especially if you go back and read those things. The more you reflect and go back on them, the more it sinks in.
I love that you shared that you're a lover of books and a lover of how books can transform you. All the great people, all the great courses in the world, you've got to be an avid reader.
Absolutely, reading.
I love that reading has become cool again, even self-help. It's like, “The world is not going to get any better and you certainly aren't if you don't get back to the timeless truths.” Before, it was like, “We’ll evolve. We don’t need that anymore.” I'm like, “Who are you?” We are who we are from the dawn of civilization until the end of it. This is what it is. It's up to us to make it the best version that we can.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Thank you for being here, Will. I appreciate your time and your insights.
Thank you. This has been an absolute pleasure. I am honored to be on your show. Thank you for having me.
You're welcome. To our readers out there, if you like what you’ve learned, please be sure and hit the subscribe button out there. We'd love it if you would do us the honor of a five-star rating. Leave us a review. Leaders are known by the leadership company they keep. Will came on this show to connect with all of you. To all our tremendous readers out there, thank you for continuing to pay the price of leadership. Be sure and go over to our website, TremendousLeadership.com. Subscribe to our newsletter. We get two weeks of free eBooks too. Don't be just a reader, be a learner as well. Sign up with Will too. Thank you so much, everybody.
Important Links
Ben Saunders – Previous episode on 5 Core Life podcast
@5CoreLife – Instagram
About William Moore
Will Moore, founder of “The Momentum Movement,” is a dynamic entrepreneur, speaker, life coach, and happiness expert. After exiting his delivery startup for a nine-figure sum, Will realized that true "success" is not just about finances, but nurturing and finding balance in the 5 core areas of life.
He's now dedicated his life to helping others discover what these areas are and how to replace the failure habits built in each with what he calls "success habits." His main goal is to help others build momentum every day so they can fire on all cylinders on their way to becoming an unstoppable force, then pay it forward to help the rest of the world do the same.