1: “By the time Stuart found me, he was in the fight of his life,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.
“I can barely leave the house,” Stuart told Dan. “I can’t take a full breath, and I’m having panic attacks regularly. I’m living a nightmare.”
Stuart was a once enthusiastic, thirty-four-year-old entrepreneur. After majoring in finance in college, he worked on Wall Street before founding a company that developed applications to assist small businesses in increasing online sales.
“Within four years,” Dan writes, Stuart “had ten employees, a dozen apps, and more than 640,000 active daily users. By most accounts, he was successful.”
A few months before he had met Dan, Stuart had spearheaded an initiative to re-architect the backend code that powered his company’s apps. The project required him to work around the clock, fourteen-hours a day, seven days a week.
Stuart and his team successfully finished the project before Christmas. Stuart was exhausted. He decided to take a short vacation to Disneyland with his wife and her sister.
But within ten minutes of entering the park, he suddenly felt dizzy, his chest was tight, and he couldn’t breathe.
“I’m find. Go on. I’ll catch up,” he told his family.
But “Stuart wasn’t fine,” Dan writes. “His heart and mind were racing. Am I having a heart attack at the happiest place on Earth?” he wondered.
Fortunately, the symptoms subsided, and he rejoined his family. But they returned with a vengeance when Stuart returned home.
“Medical tests revealed his heart was fine,” Dan notes. “The real problem? Anxiety. This puzzled Stuart because he’d never once had a panic attack, until now. Soon he was having them twice a week.”
Stuart was desperate for a solution. He immersed himself in self-help books and meditation. Despite his condition, he tried working out. Nothing worked, and his condition worsened.
Before long, he was spending most of his days in bed, “paralyzed by his body’s fight-or-flight response,” Dan writes. “His physical state was so low, even joining video calls (which COVID-19 had made standard by then) was impossible.”
2: Being an entrepreneur can be thrilling. But it can also be overwhelming.
“A UC Berkeley study,” Dan shares, “showed that entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to report a lifetime history of depression, ADHD, substance abuse, and bipolar disorder.”
Most company founders start with the best intentions—”to provide solutions, to disrupt the market, or to spend more time with family and friends.”
So why are many entrepreneurs struggling with “a litany of physical and mental health issues?”
Why? Because we fall into what Dan calls the “pit of deception,” where we believe that “the more I work, the more productive my business will be.”
This appears to be the path to success: “Work hard, stay ahead,” he explains. “That’s the enticing part—the reason we get tricked. But over time, a hard-work ethic can lead entrepreneurs to believe one thing: more input, more output.”
But being busy is not the same as being productive. “A hamster on a wheel is awfully busy,” Dan notes. “I can think of more than one entrepreneur who spends hours a day running errands, being interrupted by team members, processing emails—they’re certainly busy all day, but there’s not a lot getting done,” Dan notes.
This mindset shows up in different ways. “When I met him,” Dan writes, “Stuart had convinced himself that hiring and training others required too much time, energy, and money. Tackling most tasks himself was easier and, to him, the most efficient way of ensuring things were done right.
“So he did everything. Why not? Stuart wasn’t just the bookkeeper and accountant; he was also the chief engineer, the lead project manager, the head of fulfillment, the head of customer support, and his own personal assistant.
“His high standards and insane work ethic were undeniable, even admirable,” Dan observes. “But he was working seventy-hour weeks during an average month and hundred-hour weeks when duty called.
“Which is why he had an anxiety attack half a block from Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
3: Dan has discovered a better way forward for entrepreneurs: “The little-known secret,” he writes, “to reaching the next stage of our businesses is spending our time on only the tasks that: (a) we excel at, (b) we truly enjoy, and (c) add the highest value (usually in the form of revenue) to our business.
“Likely, two to three tasks fit that description. Every other task we’re handling is slowing our growth and sucking the life from you, and we should clear it from your calendar.”
Which means someone else should be doing about 95 percent of our current work so we can focus on what truly matters. We need to spend our time where it will have the greatest impact.
“If we’re stuck in the grinding force of emails, phone calls, and putting out small fires, this probably sounds ridiculous,” Dan predicts. “But stay with me. For just a minute, forget whether or not what I’m saying is possible, and instead just consider how we’d feel if we were only executing what we’re better at than everyone else, what we truly love, and what adds a crazy amount of value to our business.”
How would that feel?
“Chances are, we’d breathe a huge sigh of relief,” Dan predicts. “Our minds would probably clear. We’d probably be a better spouse, a better parent, and a better friend. Our employees would be happier because we’d come into work refreshed, steering the company toward bigger, better, and more inspirational goals, allowing each of them to flex their own professional muscles.”
Underlying Dan’s approach is the idea of buying back our time. “The Buyback Principle means we should continually use every resource we can to buy back our time,” Dan suggests. “Then, fill that extra time with activities that light us up with energy and make us more money.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I prioritizing tasks that truly align with my strengths and bring the most value to my business, or am I stuck in the busywork trap?
Action: Identify one task I can delegate or eliminate to free up time for high-impact activities that energize me.
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