The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Ludovic Vuillier

Welcome to episode #17 of The Morning Upgrade Podcast. With me today is Ludovic Vuillier, creator of the Good Life Manifesto. He enjoys traveling the globe and learning about the unique parts of the places he visits. He also is a bird enthusiast, and loves learning about them.

Top Talking Points

• Improving oneself with small 1% changes to the way you live.
• Knowing what areas of the business aren’t for you, and passing off that work to other people.
• Doing things that may not be great for your business, but that you find enjoyable.

Resources & Links

Share Link for this episode

Connect With Ludovic at his website The Good Life Manifesto

Find The Books Mentioned on Kindle or Audible: 

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

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I’m glad you joined us and listened as I talked to Ludovic. Click the image below so you can subscribe and never miss another episode. Also, I’d love to hear your feedback, so be sure to leave a review. 

Episode Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote. Where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan Cote:

This is Ryan Cote with the morning upgrade podcast. Today, I’m super excited to be speaking with Ludovic Vuillier. Hey, Ludovic, how are you?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Fine. Thank you, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan Cote:

I’m doing great. So Ludovic is in Paris. So my previous episode with Amanda Harvey from Taiwan. So again at this technology just to be able to speak right now, you know, I’m in New Jersey, you’re in Paris. It’s amazing. And I’m really excited to talk to you.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Thank you. I’m excited to be on your show.

Ryan Cote:

So why don’t you talk about what you do and what your interests are, what you enjoy doing?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Sure. So I used to be in management consulting, but for many years, I’ve been in FinTech. And about a year and a half ago, almost two years I think, I started the good life manifesto, that’s a passion for projects, the FinTech is the main business. We do payment processing and various other related services. That’s what I do in the day-to-day. What I enjoy is traveling.

Ryan Cote:

Where do you travel to? What’s your favorite places?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Anywhere Where I can go. I spent some time in Turkey and Cyprus. I spent some time in Israel in France, England, Russia. I loved Russia. I want to go back to Russia.

Ryan Cote:

I’ve never been to Russia. What about it did you love?

Ludovic Vuillier:

First of all, I understand the culture. There’s something I can relate to them very well, and it’s gorgeous. Whether you’re in the city or you’re out in nature, it’s just beautiful.

Ryan Cote:

The place that stands out for me is, my wife and I for our honeymoon, which is 14 years ago now, we went to Greece and it was just, I don’t know if we’ll ever have, I mean, I shouldn’t say that we will have another trip like that once the kids are grown up, but man, it was beautiful. Unbelievable.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Greece is beautiful and the people are very warm, also, it makes it easy to be comfortable with them, right?

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. It was great. Everyone’s very nice. Just a solid trip. And I love that you love traveling too. And I feel like that ties into personal development because relationships meeting new people, going out of your comfort zone, traveling to new places, it’s all interconnected. The good life manifesto, you know, originally I connect with you cause you know, mourning upgrades a personal development podcasts, and I saw that you had the good life manifesto and I find it really interesting, especially it’s a passion project, like morning upgrade. What’s your overall approach to personal development for yourself?

Ludovic Vuillier:

For myself it’s, look, I know I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. But as long as every day I’m going in the right direction, changing one small thing, then I’m happy. That’s the way I see it.

Ryan Cote:

Have you ever read the book called the compound effect? I haven’t read the book itself, but I know the philosophy. It’s based, I assume on the Kaizen philosophy, right?.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. Basically what you just said there, like 1% changes. It’s by an author and I mentioned him before on the podcast. It sounds like I’ve got like a man-crush on him. I just really resonate with his messaging and the book is really good. It’s really what catapulted me into this whole personal development thing. He’s come out with a 10-year anniversary version. So when you said that 1%, because that’s what I think, I think that’s really key to remember, the personal development or self-care, whatever you want to call it. Self-Improvement, it’s really like that 1% change. Am I a little bit better than I was yesterday? And not trying to, it’s like if you’re going to try to lose weight, not starving yourself. It’s like, okay, what small tweaks can I make? And so I love that you mentioned the 1% that its small little changes and that makes it much easier to stick with. And then you look back over the last three months and you see, Oh wow, I’ve made a lot of improvements.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Exactly. I’ll give an example, you know, throughout the pandemic I took it as an opportunity to upgrade my physical self. I had a bit of extra fat around the waist and my muscle mass had gone down a little bit simply because I’d been traveling and not putting in enough effort into doing exercise. And I figured you know what, I’m stuck anyway. So let me work on this. And I made the tiniest little changes, so small, I didn’t even think that it would make that big of a difference. And the other day I got on the scale and I checked myself in the mirror also. And there was a difference of fat gone down, down muscle gone up, a total difference of about four and a half kilos, that’s about 10 pounds, by doing practically nothing.

Ryan Cote:

Can you share what you did?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Yeah. So for example, I cut bread to once a week, maximum. I didn’t cut it out completely because I like bread. So I also know my limits. Cheese, once a week I have my cheese and bread. And when I say cheese, I don’t even mean the low-fat cheese. I’m talking about cheese that has 40 and 50% fat. So once a week I have that and the rest of the time, I eat mostly slow carbs, lentils, and rice, I don’t know if you’d consider that’s low-carb or not. Proteins such as tuna, eggs, you know. So I keep my food very simple, like sweet potatoes. I eat almost exactly the same thing every day. So like that, I don’t need to think because the more I think about it, the more there’s a chance that I’ll do something I’m not supposed to.

Ryan Cote:

That’s a lesson right there too is eliminating the amount of decisions you have to make. I think it’s like the Steve Jobs, not quote, but information about him where he would wear the same outfits every day cause it was like one less decision he had to make. So I love that you mentioned that.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Exactly. It’s just makes habit of it where you don’t need to think. And once a week the one day that I really think about the food is on Saturdays. That’s the one day that I give to myself to think about the food and like that, I can go all out within reason obviously, and eat whatever I want.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. Having cheat days makes it, it’s important. So do you have a morning routine?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Yes. It’s not set in stone, but I have general guidelines for what I do in the morning.

Ryan Cote:

And what does that look like?

Ludovic Vuillier:

So I wake up, obviously. The first thing, that’s already a good morning there. The next thing I do is I make sure that the birds, I have two birds to get their food, any medicine that they’re supposed to get, clean dishes and everything. And only then do I start taking care of myself. So now I do basic breathing exercises, which is instead of meditation, it’s just two minutes of breathing, not specifically deep breathing, but focused breathing. And then I do a little bit of exercise, shower, eat, and I’m good to go for the day.

Ryan Cote:

And you mentioned birds, this is not really, this is just kind of like my curiosity. This is not at all tied to personal development unless you can make it tied to it. I don’t know, we’ll see. When I was learning more about you, I saw that you liked birds. What is it about birds that you like?

Ludovic Vuillier:

First of all, I’ll start off by saying that there’s something about them that I don’t know, I just love them. They’re very loving, incredibly intelligent. You can’t force them to love you either, they’re very independent, but when they do love you, I can honestly say they may be the most loving beings I’ve ever come across.

Ryan Cote:

How many birds do you have?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Now I have two, I did have more before and I had a quail at some point, but they only lived for a few years. So just birds. They’re incredible. They’re intelligent, they’re curious. So that’s it. That’s what I love about birds.

Ryan Cote:

I have two cats. I feel like they would not get along with your two birds.

Ludovic Vuillier:

They may be very happy, but I’m not too sure about my birds.

Ryan Cote:

My one cat’s very old. He’d be fine. He would probably ignore them. My young one probably wouldn’t. So I like to sometimes talk about challenges on this podcast because mindset, you know, personal development mindset, what’s the hardest thing about your business, and what are you doing about it?

Ludovic Vuillier:

So I’ll say the hardest thing for me about the business, right? Since I can only speak for myself. I’m very good at negotiating and closing deals, right? Even if they take a long time, that part I’m good at. But the part that I really have trouble with is the ongoing relationship with the clients and the support that needs to be given. So what I did was immediately, I passed off 90% of that off to the operations manager who then hired a support team. That was the first investment from the revenue that came in. It was to hire a support team because I know that if it’s up to me, we would lose the clients almost as fast as we closed them.

Ryan Cote:

I can so resonate with that right now because I’m exactly the same way. We did the same at Ballantine, my family’s marketing agency. You’re right. If it was up to me to like nurture the clients, we’d probably lose them all. And so you have to be self-aware as to what your strengths are and your weaknesses and delegate out the weaknesses. So thanks for sharing that. You like to travel a lot, I love that you have the good life manifesto site and service. What is the perfect day look like for you now? Not necessarily like traveling around the world, like a realistic, perfect day. What does that look like for you?

Ludovic Vuillier:

What I noticed about myself is that I love discovering new things. It could be new people, new foods, a new place. So it’s not only being able to travel because sometimes you need to be… I read a study about something that I love, right. And so I learned something new. But the perfect day would be that I wake up, have my little tea, the birds around, and then it’s throughout the day I don’t like to work to be focused work. I know that sounds horrible, I mean, I have a business, but I don’t want to be focused for it. I prefer to divide it up throughout the day and the rest of the day, just be discovering people or places. For anybody who thinks that that means only travel, no. I can guarantee wherever you live unless you’ve actually looked at the place as a tourist. I guarantee you there’s loads of stuff you haven’t seen yet. I just like to treat every place as though I’m a tourist wide-eyed, you know, and go and discover it.

Ryan Cote:

And you’re absolutely right. We just got back from a three-week road trip in the US and yeah, you’re right. There’s so much around us, you, that you don’t even realize. And so I love that advice to kind of explore the areas around you that you probably don’t even know are there. And (Inaudible 10:46) need to go to Greece or to Turkey or to Russia. You know, you’ve got something in your backyard that probably you don’t even know about.

Ludovic Vuillier:

The other thing is, I mean, I love discovering stuff, but I also love working with my hands. Since that’s something that my industry knows completely not a part of it, but I just completely cerebral. Then I love building things or fixing things or taking them apart and learning how they work. I just love doing that. You can learn so much. So that’s another part of discovering that I love doing.

Ryan Cote:

Like home projects or like working on a car?

Ludovic Vuillier:

So right now I’m building up, I bought recently a land Rover an old one, right, where the engine is a hundred percent mechanic and mechanical and I’m fixing it up. Right now I’m rewiring the entire car.

Ryan Cote:

That’s great. That’s a great hobby to have. You probably learn a lot too. Does it become like a brain exercise too? Cause I’d imagine you’re taking things apart and you have to figure out, Oh wait, what did I just take apart, and does that troubleshoot what I had to make it work. I’d imagine it’s probably very taxing on your brain.

Ludovic Vuillier:

It is and that’s the thing. So I did study electrical components when I was younger, it was part of the studies that I did. But it’s to be fair, I mean, it’s not the type of electricity that you would use in a day-to-day thing. A few years ago, I fixed up a sailboat, that gave me a lot of information about how the electrical systems on systems work, but a car is a lot more complex. So I love learning. For example, I had someone who was advising me, it was explaining to me about relays and you know I had a basic idea of what the relays do but I had to go and Google and really understand the magic behind all the possibilities and when you know how to use them correctly. So I love it. I’m learning tons of new stuff.

Ryan Cote:

I love your energy. It sounds like your really into this stuff. I’ve got one more question for you and then you can share how people can learn more about you, whether it’s your business bears crest or the good life manifesto. But let’s talk about the good life manifesto for that business specifically. What have you learned from either starting it or running the good life manifesto?

Ludovic Vuillier:

Oh, so I think the biggest, I won’t say shock, but the biggest eye-opener for me was how different everybody sees what a good life is. We all grow up in our own little bubbles, no matter where you are in the world, whether you came to the world in a family and background with loads of challenges that were easily seen. But whether the challenges were more subtle, we all have challenges obviously. But based on that, based on each person’s skills and talents and preferences, what’s a good life for each one of us can be so, so different. And that for me was an eye-opener because to me, I mean, it was simple. A good life is when you have complete freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. And for some people that is absolute (Inaudible 13:43). Some people prefer to be given their workload for the day and then at the end of the day, they can go home and just have a meal with their family and whatnot. And for me, that’s not what I would want. I liked the freedom where I get to choose every step of the way. I think that that was the biggest lesson for me.

Ryan Cote:

I think a good takeaway for my audience here is that you know, define what your good life looks like. You can’t live a good life if you don’t know what it is. Right.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Exactly. And don’t rely on what other people are. You know, sometimes some things may seem sexy, right? Like luxury cars, for example, or beautiful houses, travel. And the fact that they may seem good doesn’t mean that that’s what will make you happy. And for some people, just the idea of going to a new country or people who don’t speak their language is really stressful. So that may not be a good idea for them. So the question is for each one to find out what really makes you happy, not what makes your neighbor happy.

Ryan Cote:

Thanks, Ludovic, I really enjoyed speaking with you. What’s the best way that people can connect with you if they want to learn more about you?

Ludovic Vuillier:

I have such a singular name, you can put into Google and anything related will come up, whether it’s the good life manifesto, so personal development, or (Inaudible 15:00) you won’t find two of me, with that name.

Ryan Cote:

Awesome. Thanks for taking the time out to chat with me. And I hope you have a great day and thanks everyone for listening.

Ludovic Vuillier:

Thank you, Ryan. Likewise.

Ryan Cote:

Take care.

Announcer:

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