1: “I can’t do this anymore,” Dan Martell‘s finance said. She laid her engagement ring down on the counter.
His “once future wife” wanted out “four months shy of my wedding day, on a seemingly normal day when I’d been working since the crack of dawn,” Dan writes in his book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.
“Apparently,” she reasoned, “if I wanted to spend my life with her, I had to actually spend time with her.”
Dan is an entrepreneur. Yesterday, we looked at the dramatic story of how starting a business became his path out of jail and gave him hope for a new life.
“Entrepreneurship had redeemed my life and given me direction,” he writes.
The problem? Dan knew one approach: GSD. Otherwise known as: Get. Sh**. Done.
“Work hard, make money, stay out of trouble” was his philosophy. Day after day. It worked brilliantly. Until it didn’t.
His first two companies failed.
“Miserably,” he writes. Why? “I hadn’t learned how to work well with other people or value my time,” he reflects.
But Dan was wired to be an entrepreneur. He started a third business called Spheric Technologies in 2004.
“There, my hard work began to pay some dividends—at least professionally,” he writes. “I was working fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days, which produced 150 percent of year-over-year growth–while simultaneously tanking my personal life.”
His two failed businesses and his now failed relationship had one thing in common: Him.
“And at the heart of my problem was my GSD mentality, which blinded me to everything else,” he reflects. “I knew I needed to find a better way to run my businesses and my life.”
2: Dan found the answer in a book.
“A few years before my fiancée had left,” he explains, “I’d picked up the audiobook version of Love Is the Killer App by Tim Sanders. After reading—or rather, listening to—the whole book, I thought, ‘Wow. I just downloaded twenty years of life.'”
This new insight spurred him to read other business books, including the classics, like How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
“These books had helped my business run more smoothly, but it wasn’t enough,” he recalls. “I needed to run my life differently. I needed systems that would supercharge who I am—an entrepreneur—while also helping me be a good person.”
When Dan lost his fiancée, he realized he needed to find “a true, holistic life solution,” he notes. “I kept reading, searching, and experimenting. I found secrets here and there about how to reclaim my life, live my passion, and own a business that didn’t own me. I began to apply principles, tactics, tools, and systems from books, mentors, programs—any source I could find. And I started seeing results.”
What he found changed his life: “I began learning how to do what I love (lead businesses) and be who I want to be (a friend, father, and husband),” Dan notes.
In 2008, Dan sold Spheric and made his first million, “which completely changed my belief in what’s possible,” he reflects.
In 2009, he moved to San Francisco to start his fourth company, Flowtown. “I kept building teams and infrastructure that freed up my time and energy so I could reinvest them,” he writes. “Oddly, this time, the more my company grew, the more time I had. I’d found a way to grow my company and my time simultaneously.”
3: Then Dan had an insight that was even more powerful: “What brings me real joy,” he discovered, “is seeing other entrepreneurs find those same truths.”
The more people he met, the more conferences he attended, and the more books he read, the more he discovered “that I was not the only entrepreneur struggling with the GSD mentality.”
Dan explains: “A core principle of mine is: learn, do, teach. You don’t learn without doing, and once you’ve really learned something valuable, you should pass it on.
“Today, I know from personal experience, amazing mentors, and coaches who’ve helped me that the only way to grow our businesses past a certain point is to buy back our time and redeposit it where it matters most.”
“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it,” Stephen Covey once wrote.
Underlying Dan’s approach is the insight to buy 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 you up with energy and make you more money.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I investing my time in ways that align with my values and bring me joy, or am I just spending it?
Action: Identify one activity I can delegate or eliminate to free up time for what truly matters to me.
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