Expert Shares Secrets to the Philosophy of Success System

Will: Thanks, Kevin. I’m great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate your inviting me to share a little bit with your gang.

Kevin: Well, I’m excited about your stuff because you told me about it and you’ve told me about your philosophies. We spent some time talking about this and so why don’t we introduce to everyone a little bit about you. Why don’t you tell us, you know, what got you started in success systems.

Will: Well, what got me started in success systems, I think is probably’d best be described as a series of happy accidents. I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to know why something is the case.

Kevin: OK.

Will: Why does this happen, why is that? I am always curious about, I think, the best question that you can ask, if you can’t think of a question to ask, the best question you can ask is why? And so, right at the beginning of my life when I was in school and asked to sit down and be quiet and read and do my homework and behave myself. My first question about that was why? [chuckling]

Kevin: Trouble!

Will: And my answer that I... Yeah, and the answer that I usually got was, “Well, you know, you are going to have a job someday and you are going to have to sit at your desk and go do the ... and so very early on in school I started to worry that school for me was sort of sit down and shut up training and I wanted to know why that was and I’m not very good at either sitting down or shutting up and so from the very beginning of my entry into civilized society, I needed to know how I could live my life and enjoy the things that I wanted to enjoy without having to sit down and shut up for fifty or sixty hours a week because early on I saw that coming and I didn’t want to be a slave to somebody else’s schedule, somebody else’s way of doing things.

Kevin: Absolutely. Why systems, though, I mean, what does the system have to do with not wanting to adhere to someone else’s schedule. It sounds interesting doesn’t it?

Will: Well, yeah, I mean it is and it’s sort of the things that can trip you up is also the thing that can save you or the other way around. The thing that saves you can be the thing that trips you up. I guess the best way to introduce this idea to somebody is to describe really quickly an event that happened on an ordinary day that I didn’t see coming. It was just sort of an unremarkable conversation I had, but this conversation turns to have sort of changed everything.

Kevin: A-ha.

Will: I was at a client’s site a couple of, jeepers, almost a year ago now. I was at a client’s site and we had just gotten this new client. It’s for a billing company that I own, one of my companies, and we were doing billing for this company and we were there doing data import. Again, none of this is particularly interesting. We were going to do billing for them and so we were gathering up their contracts and loading them into our systems and we had asked their staff to help us with a lot of this work because they knew their systems and they knew their customers and so what we did was we brought a bunch of laptops over there and we gave a couple of laptops to a couple of the employees along with stacks of contracts and we would send them home, take this stuff, enter this data, and then log on and then load it up to our systems and that’s how we’ll get the data entry part of this thing done efficiently without a whole lot of interruption to everybody’s routine and at one point I had that conversation with one of the staff members there, this girl, and I handed her a laptop and said, “Ok, here’s this. Take this. Bring it home. Log on to the internet and just load it up to our systems,” and I knew this girl for a long time and this company is a martial arts school and so these people are athletes and focused and directed and super confident, you know, they’re great people that I respect deeply, even these, very young martial arts instructors are incredible, you know, incredible people with great character and when I handed her a laptop and told her to go home and do this and log in to the internet, this girl, got real quiet and she kind of looks down at the floor and she says, “Oh, gees! I’m really sorry, you know, the thing of this is I don’t have internet because money’s kind of tight and so I’d love to help you, but I can’t help you.”

Kevin: A-ha.Will: And this was a complete disconnect from my experience of this woman because I’m, you know, because I go and take, you know, kickboxing classes at this school from time to time and I know these people and all of a sudden this super confident, super strong woman turned into an insecure, shy, apologetic loser and I felt awful, first of all, and I said, “Look, here’s the thing. First of all, you don’t need any of that stuff, right? Click here, you know, plug this into your phone, click here, and load it up. We’ve got internet access. That’s no problem and so I solved the business problem and then a couple of weeks before that I had been cleaning out a desk and I found an old ID badge from, I think it was, you know, the early nineties and it was an ID badge from a temporary service agency and it had my picture on it and I was working as a temp.

Kevin: OK.

Will: And earning nine bucks an hour and I had found this ID badge when I was cleaning out my desk a few weeks before and I showed my wife. I was like, “Honey, look!” And I had to put it in my wallet. And so now, I’m talking to Kelly and so I take the ID badge out of my wallet and said, “Look. Look at this picture,” and then, you know, it says so and so, Temporary Services, and there is my picture.

Kevin: A-ha.

Will: And I show her the thing and said, “Look. This is me, you know, ten, twelve years ago, earning nine bucks an hour, sorting material safety datasheets, you know, just awful grunt work, making no money, and that is me ten or twelve years ago, and if you look out the window, that’s my hundred and twenty thousand dollar Porsche, right there. And I park it next to my eighty thousand dollar BMW.”

Kevin: A-ha.

Will: And I do exactly what I want and I live exactly the way I want to live and the only difference between me in this picture in this ID badge, me, the temp and, me, now is time. That’s the only difference. I was every bit as successful in that picture, the temp, as I am today. I was every bit exactly the same person then that I am now.

Kevin: OK.

Will: And so, she is like, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah!” So, please don’t ever apologize about money. Money doesn’t mean a thing, alright! Money, if anything, is something that usually has to catch up with us as we change the way we experience ourselves.

Kevin: Say that again! That’s interesting. I like that.

Will: What I’m always telling people is, you know, somebody says, “Oh, you want to buy a jet! Isn’t that a lot of money?” And I like, “Maybe! I don’t know! It doesn’t matter.” Money is not the point of almost anything. Money is not the point and that is a big mistake that a lot of us make, especially, when we want to achieve something. We worry about usually we worry about the thing that is about ninety percent of the way there.

Kevin: Sure.

Will: If you want a jet, everybody thinks, “Oh my Gosh! You want a jet you’re going to have to get fifteen million dollars to get even a small jet!” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I don’t want fifteen million dollars, I want a jet!”

Kevin: Right.

Will: They’re not the same thing.