1: “Oprah Winfrey had a rough childhood,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.
“She bounced between her grandmother, her mother, and the man she calls her father, Vernon,” Dan writes. “As a young girl, she was abused. As a teenager, she had an unplanned pregnancy. Those were just a couple of the many troubles she faced as a young black girl and teenager in the 1960s.”
But Oprah was driven. She wanted to be a broadcast journalist and was hired as a news anchor in 1977.
“But the next year, she was demoted. Apparently, she was the wrong color,” Dan writes. “The network had hired her, then kind of fired her, then ‘didn’t know what else to do with her,’ so they put her on a not-so-well-rated talk show.”
But then something magical happened.
“The moment I did that talk show,” Oprah reflects, “I felt like I could be myself. . . This is what I’m supposed to do.”
As a reporter, “she’d felt as if she were taking advantage of the people she interviewed by using their personal lives to sell news,” Dan writes. “But when she got real, into people’s lives, she connected with her own calling.”
The rest is history. World-renowned talk show host. Forty-seven Daytime Emmys. “Queen of All Media.” One of the first black billionaires.
“She’s inspired millions and built an empire, and she’s loving every second of it,” Dan writes.
2: Oprah discovered what psychologist Gay Hendricks calls “the genius zone.”
In Gay’s book The Genius Zone, he categorizes all the activities and tasks workers perform during a typical work day. His research suggests that when entrepreneurs are spending time in their individual genius zones, they are able to tap into their unique, innate talents. Gay calls it the “entry gate to the garden of miracles.”
These are the valuable activities that we know best, that give us tremendous energy, and that the marketplace rewards us for. “The more time invested there, the more money we’ll make,” Dan observes.
The problem? “Most entrepreneurs spend their time in the exact opposite way,” he notes, “on tasks that are sucking their time and energy and making less money.”
3: As entrepreneurs, our job is to identify our “genius zone” and then use Dan’s “Buyback Principle” to maximize the time we spend there.
Here’s what we do: Audit. Transfer. Fill.
Audit: We begin by paying attention to how we spend our time. We ask ourselves: “What tasks do I hate doing that are easy and inexpensive to offer someone else?” Dan’s prediction: “Likely we’ll find dozens of tasks someone else could do.”
Transfer: We ask: “Who do I have on my team—or who can I hire, even part-time—to take these over?”
Fill: We ask: “What tasks should I focus on that I love doing that can immediately bring more money to my company?”
This is not a one-time activity. Audit. Transfer. Fill. We initiate “an infinite loop upward where the more money we make, the more we can buy back your time . . . so we can continually upgrade our time throughout our entrepreneurial journey,” Dan explains.
When we embrace the buyback principle, we realize that “time is the currency, the vehicle allowing us to purchase what we love or what we hate,” Dan notes. “If we purchase more work that we can’t stand, well, we’ll build a business of pain. If instead we constantly think of trading additional money to buy back our time, we’ll grow a company that we’ll love, not one that we’ll want to escape from.”
Which is what happened to Oprah. As a reporter, “she felt like she was exploiting her audience, not serving them,” Dan writes. “She made less money and simultaneously disliked her job.
“It wasn’t until she realized her gift was shining a light on other people by interviewing them and sharing their genius with the world that her whole financial world exploded.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I spending most of my time in my own “genius zone,” or am I letting low-value tasks drain my energy and potential?
Action: Audit how I spend my time this week, identify one task to delegate or eliminate, and use that freed-up time to focus on what energizes me and creates value.
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