1: GSD. Getting stuff done.
Perhaps replace stuff with a less polite word.
This trait is fundamental for most entrepreneurs. “Born entrepreneurs have to find a way to live fully, in their business and in life,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time.
“If we’ve been eating the GSD fruit for some time now, we’ve probably found some success,” Dan notes. “Hard work, even at the expense of our relationships, will pay off, to a degree. But at some point, success will stall.”
Our tendency is to take on more and more work. Until it doesn’t. Why? Because we’re one person with a fixed amount of time.
What happens next is predictable. We begin to dread going to work: “Because we know,” Dan observes, that “we have a stack of emails to respond to, new fires to put out, and a dozen clients, customers, and employees waiting to dump work on our lap.”
We may also dread coming home: “Because we’re exhausted, stressed, and still thinking about all that’s left at work,” he writes.
2: At some point, something breaks.
“Entrepreneurs who continue believing that everything rests on their shoulders—especially the low-value tasks they hate performing—will eventually hit the pain line,” Dan predicts.
What exactly is the pain line?
It’s the point where further growth becomes impossible—which usually happens when the entrepreneur has about twelve direct reports and just over $1 million in revenue, Dan notes.
“At that point,” he writes, “we’ve built a business on our hard work ethic. Even if we have employees, all the stress is still on us. ‘The buck stops with me’ is our mentality.”
We can sustain growth up to a certain level. “But then the emails, the to-dos, the low-value tasks we hate doing continue sucking our energy—it all creates a wall of pain,” Dan observes. “We realize that the more we grow, the more pain we’ll experience. Our calendar will explode, and the weight of our responsibilities will increase. We think about work constantly, and we dread going in.”
Something has to give. “It could be their health, their morals, their family, or simply their daily habits,” he notes. “As I was writing this book, three of my new coaching clients came to me with stress-induced shingles or adrenal fatigue.”
How do entrepreneurs respond?
Some “self-medicate the daily stress with a variety of vices, ranging from the seemingly harmless to the clearly addictive,” Dan notes. “Maybe we overeat, game into the early morning, or veg in front of the television. If we’ve been in this longer and dealt with the stress for decades, we may have turned to much more harmful activities to get our heads’ clear’ from the daily tasks that are haunting us.”
3: There is, however, a better way. We can buy back our time.
This transformation often begins with a realization: We are “only really truly great at a few key aspects in our companies,” Dan explains. “Time spent elsewhere is draining (and ultimately costly).”
We use our money to buy back our time. Because our time is our most finite and most important asset. When we are wise in how we invest our time, we generate more energy. And more money.
“The Buyback Principle means we should continually use every resource we can to buy back our time. Then, fill that extra time with activities that light us up with energy and make us more money.”
There is an important caveat: “Notice the emphasis isn’t simply on ‘hiring,'” Dan writes, “but on hiring with a purpose: reinvestment.”
Hiring employees alone does not solve our problem. Many times, more employees equals more stress.
We “don’t hire to grow our business,” he suggests. We “hire to buy back our time. This concept will not only grant us more financial success than we thought possible, but with it, we’ll also be able to craft the life we originally envisioned when we became an entrepreneur.”
What happens next?
“A wonderful cycle begins: as our company makes more money, we buy back even more time,” Dan explains. “The result: we’ll be happier, and we can continually upgrade our time and buy back our freedom.
“As people pay us to do what we love, our energy goes up and we make more money, redepositing it back into what we’re excellent at,” he predicts. “Our business grows. . . As more work comes in, and we stay focused on what we enjoy, our business will pull in more revenue.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Where am I hitting my own pain line-feeling overwhelmed, drained, or stuck-and what low-value tasks could I delegate or eliminate to reclaim my energy?
Action: Identify one recurring task that drains my energy and take a concrete step this week to delegate, outsource, or remove it from my plate.