Unlocking the GoodLiife with Bill Zujewski

* Website 

Skot Waldron (03:50.54)
What’s up, Bill? How you doing,

Bill Zujewski (03:52.322)
Good, good, psyched.

Skot Waldron (03:54.04)
Good. I can tell you do your pushups and your pull ups before you got on. Make sure you’re.

Bill Zujewski (03:58.134)
I did a little bit. worked on my fitness and health score. Yes.

Skot Waldron (04:02.559)
Where you go? Of course you did. Of course you did. So this is this is going to be good. I before we dive into that’s a little plug, but a little little preview there of what we’re going to talk about. But honestly, man, I want to know how you even got to this space in the first place, because this is I’ll you know from a. You know, just from a career standpoint. People don’t.

Generally start out with health and life and wellbeing type things, right? Unless you’re going into some nutritional science thing or whatever, but it’s like, this is kind of like the good life stuff. I mean, taken from your company name there, but it’s that. So how’d you even land here in the first

Bill Zujewski (04:55.246)
Yeah, no, I didn’t start as a fitness nut or a balanced life, like, you know, huge advocate. I’m actually been in corporate marketing for most of my career. So first 25 plus years, I’m working in the high tech industry, managing, you know, large marketing departments. And then I really became an entrepreneur in my fifties, recently, about six years ago.

Started this company, Green Business Bureau, with a couple other guys. And then I launched Good Life on my own. I kind of got the entrepreneur bug from that last company. I said, can do this myself. but the background, even when I was back in corporate marketing, I was a huge believer of living a balanced life. I had four kids, I never missed their games. I tried to travel as little as possible.

And I would even assess myself at the end of each year, you know, New Year’s Eve, you know, I’d look at my health, how am I doing? I scored zero to 10. I’d look at my other, you know, the, my career, my finances. So at some point I said, Hey, maybe this is a useful tool others can use. And somehow I landed on about a year into this, trying to launch this good life company.

Skot Waldron (06:18.98)
Okay, you’ve gotten into, you got the entrepreneurial bug, you know? Hopefully you don’t regret that. Some of us are like, what did I do? And then you’re like, wait a second, this is the best thing ever. So I totally get it. There’s some glory there and there is something that adds to that, I guess, good life mantra, you know, of…

Bill Zujewski (06:28.141)
Yeah

Skot Waldron (06:46.734)
How do we in going off your tagline get good at life? And when you are the owner of your own domain, you make your break.

Bill Zujewski (06:56.524)
Yeah, no, mean, it’s clearly, I gotta say, for those who are doing it, at first, it was tough not having any cashflow, right? It’s scary, you know? And so I didn’t jump all in. When I was at Green Business Bureau, I was in half the time and I was doing some fractional CMO work. So I had some income coming in, cause it’s not easy. It’s like the ultimate chess match against the world, right? Creative business.

Um, and, then, uh, I felt confident that we took that company from zero to like 3000 customers. I felt confident I could do it now myself with AI. Uh, and I got, I was pretty fortunate. I had, I was acquired by Oracle twice. So I had a little bit in savings that gave me at least a little bit of cushion where I didn’t have to super stress out over, you know, having no job and just trying to get this company going.

Skot Waldron (07:55.748)
Yeah, that’s great, man. That’s great. Yeah, it’s either, you know, you hear about the people that are going, you know what, there’s no safety net. I’m going all in because if I know there’s a safety net, I won’t go all in. And then there’s other people that are like, most of the people are kind of like, yeah, I’ll do some fractional work or I’ll keep this little gig on the side, or I’ll do this in the meantime while I’m trying to transition to my, you know, my professional hobby, you know, kind of thing. It starts out that way and then they blow it up. So, very cool. But let’s talk about the things you’ve built and living this idea of a well-balanced life. So why are you tackling that? And I’m gonna, I’m throwing that out there because I’m assuming it’s because you believe that people aren’t living a well-balanced life. Where you hear a lot that people are in a well-balanced life. And what does that even mean, Bill? What does it even mean to have a balanced life? Does it mean like 50 % work, 50 % like fun? Like, I don’t know.

Bill Zujewski (08:47.458)
Yeah.

Right, right, right. No, it’s a great question. As you get older, you look for, and you don’t, this is one of the things I’m trying to promote to even young professionals, which is you need a purpose, right? And I realized that two things, I’ve been doing a lot of mentoring of my four kids, their friends, my family has struggled in some areas and I’ve helped them. I’m like,

Geez, I actually have a pretty good life that I’ve designed the last 30 years and created, you know, and I’ve done well. I’m actually in the position to actually guide people, maybe even prescribe what they should be doing. and, and I do, I did one of my guiding principles was, you know, this balance part and you’re right. Balance. think, okay, I’m not balance between work and home. And I’m talking about a larger balance, like this wheel of life where you gotta look at your life in eight buckets, not just work and home. You gotta look at your relationships, your friends, your romance, your occupation, your finances and wealth. What’s your purpose? What are you doing about growing? What are you doing about leisure? So there’s all these buckets that you have to invest time in and spread your time equally across to kind of have a more healthy, fulfilling, happier life is what I found. So that’s what I try to do. I try to define this kind of circle of life. turns out life coaches, I thought I invented it by the way, then I, cause I wasn’t a life coach. And then I started, when I started creating the software, I found like, you know, a hundred versions of the Wheel of Life.

Coaches already using it. So there’s science behind it. There’s a ton of science behind it. So it’s not just Bill Zujewski’s opinion. There’s a lot of it’s based on professors from Stanford and Harvard and how to live a happy life, a good life. it’s all, you know, it’s basically my goal is, hey, life is hard. How could I help people, you know, with life? And I come from software. I’ve been doing software for 30 years. Let’s see if software could help.

Skot Waldron (11:11.362)
Okay, so we’re talking about life. Life involves work. When we’re talking about how to be healthy just in a life standpoint, and you’re talking about relationships and romance and all these things, how do those things impact the workspace in your eyes, like in culture?

Bill Zujewski (11:38.826)
Yeah, no. I think there’s this belief that you gotta put in like 60 hours and separate the two worlds, black and white. I actually have some of my best friends or people I’ve worked with the last 30 years. There’s no way you can separate it that distinctly.

And there’s no doubt also, I’ve seen people who are stressed, anxious, not happy, and their performance in work just suffers from that. You can see the blowups. could say something going on in that person’s life and it’s spilling over into their work and really hurting them. And so I think there’s a lot of side benefits that an intangibles from having a happy life at home and healthy friends and relationships and being healthy that make you be a much better, more productive, more focused worker at work. So I think the two go hand in hand.

Skot Waldron (12:49.998)
Totally agree. And in this day and age when a lot of us, you know, have a hybrid environment or work from home type environment or whatever, you’re actually working in your home and you can try to separate it by having your office in a different room if you have the luxury of doing that, or in the basement or whatever. But physically, sure, it’s hard to separate, but mentally it doesn’t work. if you’re struggling, you’re right, if you’re struggling at home and you’re gonna bring that to work. If you’re struggling at work, you’re gonna bring that home. And it definitely transcends that gap, that wall where you’re like, nope, we keep stuff separate here. We don’t talk personal. You keep personal life personal. You keep work life work. It’s like, not anymore, man.

Bill Zujewski (13:36.93)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I realized too is there are companies that actually care about this stuff that don’t have cultures where, you know, you can’t leave before your boss. You know, you have to put in 60, 70 hours and all that. There are other cultures, you know, at companies I found that half Fridays off. My son works at a company every second Friday. They work, you know, they have off, they work a nine day, nine hour work schedule and it’s cause they want to give their employees that there are other ones that give you, you know, wellbeing programs and all that. So I think, and I think this younger generation is looking for that. I think they’re tired of kind of burnouts that they see that around them. Maybe it’s their family and friends and are looking One of the reasons I’m optimistic about my company is I think I’m timed right With what young professionals want out of life, which is they they want that balance They don’t want to sacrifice that much just for the money and career anymore

Skot Waldron (14:44.782)
You’ve created these scores, right? Like a Zen score and a Life score. Tell me about what those are. What’s the difference between them? I got your book here. thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got your book. I’ve started going through and scoring my stuff. I’m not all the way through it yet, but I like how you’ve written it. I like that the chapters are punchy. I like that you have these assessments at the end where you can kind of score your stuff. Love that.

Bill Zujewski (14:51.192)
Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.

Skot Waldron (15:14.084)
Tell us the difference between like that idea of a Zen score and a life score and how we break.

Bill Zujewski (15:18.51)
Yes. Yes. So it’s pretty simple. The first one is Zen score. You could probably guess it’s something to do with how you feel, right? So Zen score is how you feel about 11 areas of your life, right? It goes through your health, your home environment, your leisure, your growth, your friends, your romance, all those areas. And it’s last one question. It takes two minutes to get your Zen score. How do you feel about your fitness, how you look and your health, right? That’s zero to 10. And then the next one is, do you feel safe at home and are able to relax and entertain guests, right? It talks about your home environment and where you live. Like it’s one long question. So you go through these 11 questions and it spits out a score from zero to a hundred.

And you know, if you’re 50, 60, 70, it’s like almost a letter grade. You know, you’ve got some things to work on, but it’s your, it’s how you feel. Right. So then the life score takes a lot longer to complete. It’s like a hundred plus questions and it’s actually assesses, you doing the right things? Okay. So, um, this is where I differ from most life coaches. Most life coaches are just trying to listen and guide.

I’m actually trying to prescribe. I actually have a playbook here, right? So you go to my you go to the 13 questions for your finance score and your life score It’s gonna say hey, are you saving 10 % of your pay every week? Do you have a 401k? Do you have a rainy day fund? All and so it’s asking, you know, is your mortgage less than one-third of your pay so

It’s do you know what mutual funds and 529s are? So it’s really black and white. Like you need to get your finance act together and do these things.

Right? Same with health. Are you doing cardio three to five times a week? Are you doing strength? Are you, you know, doing any breathing exercises? So everyone’s different, of course, but we know that people are happy, healthy, doing well, do these things in those, those eight areas. And, and the life score is like almost a self-diagnostic. Here’s what everyone else is doing to be really good in these eight areas. Which ones are you doing?

So that’s the difference. Zen is how you’re feeling and then life takes 20 minutes. It’s are you actually doing those things? What are your habits, ideals, and mindsets?

Skot Waldron (17:51.126)
Okay, so here I’ll tell you, Bill, so I use a tool that I call the Peace Index and it scores people on five different areas which overlap with some of yours, right? Purpose, place, which is your environment, people, your relationships, provision, which is your financial security and outlook, and then personal health, which deals with physical, mental, and spiritual. But I will tell you, I don’t get as granular as

Bill Zujewski (18:15.896)
Yep.

Skot Waldron (18:20.94)
you do right in this idea of, it’s really a gut check kind of tool. maybe it relates more to the Zen score, but, or like how you feel like you’re doing in these areas, but I really like this life score. I idea of breaking it down. Yeah. It takes a little more time, getting those averages, but then you’re actually taking it a step further and, and, and prescribing, like you said, and then you’re right.

Maybe I don’t do cardio three days a week, but that’s not my thing. So, but the idea is there. The idea is, hey, there are success formulas here that you can use at your disposal. And this is probably what you should look at doing if you’re not doing them already. Here’s a checklist, right? So that’s really cool.

Bill Zujewski (19:07.726)
Yeah, no, it is. It is a checklist. And the software, I mean, there’s a trend, of course, of mobile apps tracking your habits or your fitness and all that. So I’m doing the same thing. I’m looking at some of the best practices from those cool mobile apps. You know, I got nudges in there. If you feel like you’re not drinking enough water every day, you know, to stay kind of hydrated, you can check a box on that.

Question on your life score and say hey give me a nudge daily or weekly to remind me to drink more water right or or go or Sit us don’t sit four hours straight and go take a walk around the yard So there’s some it’s all about your habits as you know I I totally believe in that right you got to create the right habits So there there’s a little bit of micro psychology there Whatever the buzzword is of trying to nudge people to create these these habits that will help them

Skot Waldron (20:03.288)
Yeah. So you’re talking about the app, right? Going in and using the app. So you can download the app on your phone. You can go through the whole assessment. And is it free or is it paid? How’s that?

Bill Zujewski (20:07.01)
Yeah, the app, yeah.

There’s two, the Zen score is free. So go to my site, goodlife.com and you can get a quick feel for how you feel you’re doing in all those areas. Then the, the other ones like 95 bucks a year, the life score app, gets into more in depth. also has a stress score, which I didn’t even get to in the book. Cause I just launched that. If when you’re feeling down or stressed or anxious,

It goes through this checklist of 50 things that might be causing that, whether it’s unpaid bill, you didn’t work out today, I don’t feel ill. People sometimes don’t, they feel like they’re not motivated to get out of bed or in a tough spot.

And I always found it useful to try to get to the root cause. Why am I feeling down this week? Or, you know, what’s going on? And usually I look, oh, the market’s down this week and I’m down 5 % in my 401k. You know, I can get over that. So, or if there’s something that I can do about it, you know, but anyways, I don’t want go off tangent too much. That app that has kind of the stress score, the life score, that’s, um, 95 bucks. And then the, there’s a, there’s an app for coaches that allow you to kind of share scores, set goals, set plans, and kind of collaborate in the app between you, confidentially between a client and a coach and work on their score together. Yeah.

Skot Waldron (21:46.276)
Oh, that’s really cool. Good. You’re talking about scaling. Like this is, you know, B2B and B2C.

Bill Zujewski (21:53.094)
Yeah, yeah, I don’t know which market again, I’m putting I’ll put on the entrepreneur hat for second, right? I think there’s three markets for this app. you know, so starts with the system, right? I got the book to there’s a system here around scores. People love scores. It’s a number, you know, kids love Hey, I’m at 60. How do get to 80?

Skot Waldron (21:57.954)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bill Zujewski (22:13.262)
I think individuals will like doing it on their own, but some people want the coach holding them accountable. I mean, I’ve had coaches in my life. So then the coach can use it. And then the grand plan maybe is start to get into companies and help create a more balanced life culture for employees and have heads of people maybe bring this into the company to use and help their employees’ A happier employee is a more productive employee. A less stressed employee is probably less likely to lead. So I think there’s a play there, but I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure yet. Right now I’m focused on individuals and life coaches. I know, test the market.

Skot Waldron (22:56.344)
Get, get the data, man. Get the data, get the data smoke. How, how do you think this stuff? So you’re, I mean, your argument here is that if you do these things, if you have these scores, if you bring this into your organization, or if you even you’ve used these in your life, that you will have more clarity and more accountability and more per, but how, how does that work? Why, why would these things create those ideas of clarity, accountability, and even purpose for us.

Bill Zujewski (23:26.946)
Yeah, I don’t think people actually stop and do enough self-reflection and introspection and listen to their thoughts and where they are. I think this kind of forces the issue a lot. It’s kind of a, it’s a great reminder that what’s important in life. And all of sudden it becomes from a lot of the coaches that I’ve worked with already with the tool that like it say, hey, this kind of gets it from touchy-feely to more of almost like KPIs for life, right? Like here’s my KPIs, you know, and I got to hit these to do well in life. I think the worst metric I think out there, although it’s a decent metric, but not the only metric, money, clearly, right? Everyone looks at that success. What do I have for house, money, assets and all that.

And sometimes that’s the worst metric. know, it’s funny, I was having dinner with this head of people from Ireland and she’s getting used to the US culture. She says, she can’t believe how money centric you, what the United States is in Ireland. Success is how great are my kids? What are they like that I raise a great family, you know, and they give people credit for that just as much as where they are with, you know, where they live and what their salary is. I mean, it’s our culture is clearly very materialistic compared to some other cultures for sure.

Skot Waldron (25:00.44)
Yeah, I can see that. I almost consider America to be the young teenagers of the world where we’re just kind of like firing on all cylinders, going out there, blazing trails and doing whatever, falling on our face constantly, like pushing things, pushing envelopes, pushing boundaries in different ways, but it’s fast. And that achievement culture has definitely seeped into.

Bill Zujewski (25:15.576)
Yeah.

Skot Waldron (25:30.03)
to a lot of organizations that I work in.

Bill Zujewski (25:32.374)
Yeah. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with ambition. Holy smoke. I’m like super, I’m super ambitious. You know, when I’m working, I’m working hard, but I’m focused, right? I feel like a lot of people, you know, don’t, what I do in an hour, they may take four hours. Like you’ve got to, like, if you work focused and hard while you’re working, 40 hours is a ton of time to get a lot done in a week. It really is.

Skot Waldron (25:58.008)
Yeah, it is. you know, the, the mantra of, I don’t have any, I don’t have time for that. Or I don’t, I just don’t have time for, you know, exercise. I don’t have time to focus on those initiatives and those goals. I’m already burnt out. just hear so much about burnout right now. you know, what, what do you think about that? How does that play into what, what people are doing and how they can shape their lives better?

Bill Zujewski (26:05.868)
Yeah.

They just got to rewire themselves. Don’t they realize that, my God, if they think their life is hard now, imagine if they go in for like a stroke or a heart attack or some mental health issue that has been caused by what they’re doing with their lives. That’s a tough life. they need to think of the bigger picture, the future. And some people unfortunately wait till they have an incident, you know, before they actually realized that, right? And so you’re totally right. I think one of my slides or blogs had some stats in there and like one out of three people has heavy anxiety and stress in their lives. One out of three, you know? And then only one out of four people in this survey are truly happy. I’m like, Holy smokes, only one out of four people are truly happy in their lives. So clearly life is hard. And so I know I’m going after a problem that’s out there as an entrepreneur. I’m just going to have to see how much value this notion of scoring and using an app to help people will be. So time will tell. I’m pretty early.

Skot Waldron (27:42.702)
You know the other issue I think that’s out there that makes things like this hard to adopt and although that’s super important and if you talk to anybody in a room, I feel like they would go, yeah, that’s really important. That’s really important. But when the time comes to take action, they don’t take it. And one of the things I think that drives that is our immediate gratification culture and the immediate removal of pain.

Bill Zujewski (27:59.852)
Yeah.

Skot Waldron (28:12.348)
And the, can just take a pill for that culture because it’s like how, so working on my life score is going to take some effort. It’s going to take some time and it probably won’t be solved in, you know, Q1, you know, but it’s, there’s probably some immediate things you could knock out, right? Just start working on and start fuel some momentum. But you know, it takes time to work on this stuff.

Bill Zujewski (28:40.46)
Yeah, it takes time and you gotta be, you gotta have the right people around you. That’s why I’m realizing this now. The coach is just as much there to hold you accountable as he is to teach you stuff, right? A lot of the stuff now, I know you could probably go to chat GBT and read articles on whatever you want, right?

But someone needs to force you that on every, the first Monday of every month, we’re going to sit down and look at your Zen score and life score and say, my God, you, know, you actually went from a 60 down to a 58 and what are you doing? Right. I mean, it’s, it, we’ve shown that those people need those partners in AA and other programs to help them hold them accountable. I’ve been kind of lucky. My wife’s kind of helped me accountable for a lot of, you know, my life and my bosses and stuff like that. So that’s why I’m now thinking this is probably a better tool for mentors and coaches to use if you’re not self-disciplined with people rather than trying to do it themselves because they may take that score the first time and then put it on the shelf and not go back. it’s hard. Change is hard. Changing habits is hard.

Skot Waldron (29:59.906)
It is. It is, man. And I think that if even if you’re an HR leader out there or some kind of, you know, driving people and culture and head of people and what it’s it’s like, how do we make this part of our culture where maybe we don’t have this as a requirement every quarter, every six months and kind of it’s a it’s a way that we can check in, you know, as me, as we if we had a dashboard of all of our people and how they’re doing and

We could map it with their productivity and how they’ve been working and how engaged are they and all those things. There could be some definite things that we could diagnose through these tools, right? And instead of…

Bill Zujewski (30:36.067)
Right.

100%. There’s money being spent, big money on wellbeing programs. Yet, I don’t think there’s a real good set of KPIs to understand the return on those programs. What better than to just ask the person and assess the person and how they feel about their life and work life. So I think I’d have to do it again, privacy, anonymous.

You know, all those things I think you can do as long as you have like 20, 30, a hundred employees. It’s easy, right? Otherwise starts to get tricky with a small, small company, right? And keeping that stuff, stuff private. But, um, I think for sure there’s, there’s a need out there. Um, and that I’m hoping heads of people are looking for something like this to, you know, to not only, mean, immediately.

If I was at a company and someone brought this in, would think, this is changing the culture. These people care about us. Right. So I think it’s kind of, there’s some intangibles here of introducing the tools and system just to change the culture. But then it gives you a tangible way to actually implement the program.

Skot Waldron (32:05.476)
So what’s the ultimate problem you’re trying to solve, Bill?

Bill Zujewski (32:09.486)
I mean, would say happiness kind of like fulfillment, just there’s, there’s just so many people who are struggling with, with life. And so, I, I am trying to help. I’ve got 20, I got four 20 year olds. One’s about to graduate from Yukon in a couple of weeks. Three others are working in the Boston area. I treat them as I’ve as if I’m coaching them with this tool. And they, I think they’re all pretty happy and doing well. So I think there’s something here. but that’s what that’s, that’s the ultimate goal is I just, I just feel good. I mean, I mean, part of happiness is helping others and I feel good when I’m able to.

Skot Waldron (32:57.892)
That’s awesome. If people want to talk to you more about this, maybe you’ve got some people out there that want to invest in your company. Maybe you’ve got people that just want to have you on the show. Maybe they want to talk to you more about how this could be incorporated into their companies. How do they get in touch with you?

Bill Zujewski (33:14.506)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, there’s only one Bill Zdziuski in the entire planet. Yeah. So I tell my kids, Zdziuski, there’s like 30 in the whole world. So be careful because whenever someone Google’s your name, it’s going to be you that comes to the top. anyways, my site, the website’s the best place to start. can Good Life with two I’s, goodlife.com. You could download the app there.

Skot Waldron (33:19.074)
Yeah, is there really? Okay.

Bill Zujewski (33:41.678)
You can download the free version or the paid version. If you go to Amazon and just type in Zdziuski or What’s Your Life Score? Check out my book. It describes the whole concept of tracking the score. I mean, it’s like a credit rating for life, right? So the concepts explain the book. And then if you want to LinkedIn, you know, bill at goodlife.com. I don’t mind. Reach out to me.

So yeah, I would love to, love to see what people think, right? I’m in my first year of this system program and software and I’m looking for feedback.

Skot Waldron (34:22.916)
Well, one day I’m going to be able to look and go, hey, I know that guy, you know?

Bill Zujewski (34:28.554)
My moonshot is I’m sitting five years now, I’m sitting at dinner, there’s a table next to me, hey Joe, what’s your life score? I’m at 83. You gotta get, and that’s people using life score as a word.

Skot Waldron (34:41.604)
That’s right. That’s right. We often talk about like, what if we, what if we all knew each other’s like, if we had these numbers above our heads and we knew we all had a score and I could look across the table from me in a meeting and go, ah, the person’s like get out to 46 right now. Like you’re struggling, right? Like I would know how to much to push them or what.

Bill Zujewski (35:00.615)
Yeah. Yeah.

Skot Waldron (35:06.584)
going on with them, right? I wonder why they’re checked out instead of just pointing the blame and going, wow, that person’s lazy, you know?

Bill Zujewski (35:12.146)
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s funny. I’m a big studier of how the mind works. You need frameworks like that. So if I can create a framework in people’s mind and say, hey, my God, that guy’s got like a three in health, even though he’s a 10 in wealth, right? I mean, so if people could just start thinking like that, you know, I’ve done some.

Skot Waldron (35:33.134)
Very cool, Bill. It’s been great having you on the show, man. Keep pushing it. This stuff’s important. It may not move your weekly monthly sales goal number right now, but over time, investing in your people, investing in your health of your people is ultimately going to be investing in the company and the growth and the projectory of where you go. Unhealthy people are going to create an unhealthy company.

Bill Zujewski (36:02.2)
Yeah, agree, agree. Thanks, man. I bet you have a good Zen score. All right, all right, sounds good.

Skot Waldron (36:02.628)
I think it’s awesome,

I’m not done with it yet, but I’m getting there. getting there. I’ll you know.