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Stop wasting your time. Successful people don't rely on discipline or willpower to be more productive. These are the 15 principles that they follow to get done even when they don't feel like it. They're the same principles I use to go from an ADHD mess to a hyper productive $100 million CEO. So without further explaining it, these are the 15 principles to buy back your time. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal best selling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to business you don't grow to hate. My best selling book, Buy back. Your time is out now. Grab a copy@buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers, starting with chapter one, How I Buy Back My Life. My friend Stuart had a panic attack at the happiest place on earth at Disneyland. Why? He was working 100 hour weeks. He wasn't taking care of his health. He asked his family if it was okay to miss dinner and not be there in the morning so that he could work on this massive project. And because of that pressure, his body started said, screw you. Essentially, he hit his pain line and most entrepreneurs hit that. About 12 employees or a million in revenue. Because it's a point where more growth feels painful. So most people do one of the three S's when they hit their pain line. The first S is to sell. It's so painful that they'd rather sell the business, go get a normal job or do something else because the grass is greener on the other side. What I've learned is sometimes the grass is greener because it's actually fake. But selling is not an option. Selling second is sabotage. Right? They sabotage themselves by taking on new projects, new product lines, hiring bad people only to give themselves permission to fall back so that it's not their fault that they're not succeeding in their business. Or the third one is to stall. Stall means drag their feet on making decisions or stay small because not growing means slowly dying. Now that you understand what the pain line is, what do you do once you hit it? It's called the buyback loop. And there's three simple steps. The first thing is you have to audit your time for things that suck your energy would cost very little to pay somebody else to do. Second is to transfer those things in that bucket to somebody else that loves to do this. There's actually people that play at the things that you consider work. And once you transfer and give them the playbooks, which I'll talk more about in a sec. Then they'll be able to take that off your plate to open up your calendar. Which brings you to step three, which is to fill. This is the thing that brings you the most joy, the most energy, and makes you the most money, which I'll double click on when we get to the drip matrix on how to invest your newfound time. Which brings us to chapter two, the drip matrix. I believe in life, there are two categories of things that you do. There's things that feel like math class for me, which is boring, and I hated it, and it felt like every second just went super fricking slow. Or there's art class, where when I was in art class, what I felt was five minutes was more like an hour. The clock goes off, and all of a sudden I'm done. It's like time flew by. And life can be that way. Not all tasks are created the same. The way you look at your work will dictate how long it feel, feels. And I'm always looking to invest it, not just to spend it. So that's why I created the drip matrix, which is a very simple X and Y axis of things that light you up, that give you energy, to things that make you money, that produce the most income in your life. And you got to move from the bottom left quadrant all the way to the top right. So in the bottom left is D for delegate. What are the things that, when you look at your to do list, you should just delete it or. Or defer doing it this week, this month, or give it to somebody else that can do it and just learn how to delegate. Then you move up to the R, which is replacement. That quadrant is all about looking at the key people you need to hire on your team and build that team of people that can replace you from having to do the work. And that's why I teach the replacement ladder, which we'll get into in a second. But understanding the right sequence to do that will equal success. The second quadrant on the bottom is investment. Once I've got time back, then I gotta invest in developing the skills, the relationships, mindset to become a better person for my team so I could grow. And then the top right is all about production. This is where you want to do the work that gives you energy, that lights you up, that, truthfully, you would do for free, that makes you the most money. And if you don't know what that is, you'll figure it out over time. But that's why the Drip matrix is such an important map for you to understand. Where are you spending your time? And if you're not moving your way through it, then you'll always feel stuck. But to start buying back your time, you need to understand how much it's worth. And that's why I created the buyback rate formula. So for example, if your current income in your business is 200,000 a year, you divide that by 2000, then take that number by four. That equals $25 per hour. Anytime you spend money to buy back your time, you want to get a four times ROI on that money. So if you can spend $25 an hour paying anybody to take anything off of your plate, that'll give you the best return on your time. If you don't fight for the value of your time, nobody else will value your time. So you need to understand what it's worth. If I don't know that my time's worth a hundred dollars, and I keep saying yes to doing things that are $10 tasks and I'm never going to be able to grow my business. What most people don't realize the cheapest way to buy back your time is to stop doing things that suck your time. Which brings us to chapter three, the Five Time Assassins. Most people waste their time by just delaying decisions. It's like getting an email for an opportunity and instead of just replying to it right away and they just mark it as unread or start. And eventually they'll reply on some Saturday morning when they're feeling good about themselves and say, oh, let's it and that opportunity is gone. I see people sabotage their success all the time like this. And that's why I've distilled it into these five Time Assassins. The first one is the Staller, just like I just described. That's somebody that can't make a decision. Any decision is better than no decision. Because no decision is still a decision to just stall and not feel like you're making progress. The second is the Speed Demon. And this is somebody who thinks under the guise of I'm productive and I'm moving forward and I'm making decisions fast. They don't stop to reflect. They take the easiest path. For example, they hire their cousin because he can fog a mirror. Not because he's the best hire, but because he's the easiest hire. The third is the supervisor. This is the person that micromanages everything. They look at everything and they scrutinize it and they criticize it and nothing can ever be done as Good as them. So they're always there trying to be involved, which is weird because they hire people and then do their job for them. The fourth is the saver. This is somebody who penny pinches every penny. They never invest in themselves. They never invest in getting more time back. They don't invest business. They think if I spend a dollar, it's a dollar I didn't make. So every time I save money, essentially it's money I made. That sounds like a winning proposition, but it also means you can't grow. The fifth is a self medicator. And this is the person that self sabotages their growth by using food, alcohol, drugs, video games, whatever addiction. They've got to self medicate their feelings instead of confronting them head on, which causes them to always hit a ceiling of complexity instead of breaking through to become more for their team. The reason why you need to understand these is because without spending a pen, you can get back tens of hours a week. Now the question is, where do you invest it? Which brings us to chapter four, the only three trades that matter most. People think, once I get there, then I'll have time to do the thing cleaning of the garbage or processing my inbox or managing my calendar. All these things that don't generate a lot of income. They're just busy work. And what you need to do is think about spending more time in the production quadrant. Today there's really only three trade levels when it comes to time. Level one is an employee. You're trading your time for money. People pay you for your expertise, which is always tied to your time. It's not tied to an outcome. Level two is entrepreneur, which is where you trade your money for time because all of a sudden now you get paid for a result. So if you can get more results for people, then you take the money they pay you to then invest in you and your capacity so that you essentially buy back your time with the money you have. But level three is empire builder. And this is when you start figuring out how to trade your money for money. And we'll talk about this later, but that is a big idea, to really create the empire. Most people, they start off in level one and they take that mental to level two. So even though they're an entrepreneur, they're still acting like an employee when it comes to the value of their time. And then people that are in two will stay in two because they don't understand that there's a completely different paradigm shift to build their empire where they have their money, work for them, so they're not always having to work to generate money. But how do you decide what tasks to spend your money on? That's why I created the time and energy audit. It's very simple but massively impactful. First thing is we want to write down every task that we're currently doing. I like to tell people to have an alarm go off every 15 minutes to log it because most people don't realize how much time they've been spending on social media or taking these got a second meetings from their team that turns into got an hour. So we always want to write it down to do a true audit of where we're spending our time. And then what you do is once you've got this detailed list, go through each one and give a dollar sign of value of what it would cost to pay somebody else to do it. $1 is like an administrative task and $4 is like hiring somebody to do your job. And you write that next to each one. Then you want to highlight in red anything that sucks your energy that you hate doing or green things that give you energy. Once you've done that, you now have a bucket of things that cost very little that are red in nature. And that is the only next hire you should make. You shouldn't bring anybody else on your team until you grab all those red low cost things and give it to somebody else so you can free up your time. Now that you know what to take off your plate, how do you sequence it? Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to chapter five, the replacement ladder. Most people mess this up, they feel overwhelmed, they read a book and it tells them you need to hire somebody that can help with operations. You're the visionary and have somebody else come in and run your company for you. The problem with that is that you have no skill set for delegating yet you've never done it before. You're going to pay somebody six figures plus to essentially have a non revenue generating role on your team. It's going to stress you out and in six months you're probably going to fire them or they're going to quit because they're annoyed working with you. Because there was enough business for them to stay busy in the first place. So most people don't realize that the sequence that you hire equals success or failure. That's why I've outlined the first principle of this whole methodology called the buyback principle, which states you don't hire to grow your business, you hire to buy back your time. It's a capacity over calendar problem. If you do the first, then you'll just add a bunch of over overhead that you need to manage. But if you only hire people to buy back your time, then you get your time back to go be more valuable to your team to generate more revenue and do things that light you up. So here's how the replacement ladder works. It's all about the hiring need to make the feeling you're probably having right now and the ownership of outcomes that they need to take off your plate. The first rung of the ladder is you might be feeling stuck in your business because you don't have the time. And that's why you need to go hire an administrative assistant. And you got to give them two areas of your life, your inbox and your calendar. And I'm talking a hundred percent. When those emails come in, if you touch them before your admin, then you're totally misunderstanding this whole process. The second rung of the ladder, you might be feeling a little stalled in your business. It's because you're doing all the delivery, essentially all the client fulfillment. And that's where you need to have somebody support you on the onboarding and ongoing support of a new customer. Once I get a customer in my world, I want to help them do the thing. I don't want to be involved in anything that looks like process or gathering information or scheduling items in their calendar. The third rung is where you might be feeling some friction because you want to grow, but it makes it tough because you don't. You don't have a marketing system that's the next hire. Now when you bring that person in, I want you to make it clear that they own all traffic sources to your website, to your social media, and the campaigns that they should be defining and running on your behalf to generate leads every day. That marketing system should be running nonstop 24 hours a day to generate qualified leads to talk to. The fourth rung, this is where you start to feel freedom because it's a sales hire. And the moment you have somebody else, they can take all new opportunities, take all the sales calls, and most importantly, do the follow up because let's be honest, you're probably not doing them yourself and hold them accountable to generating revenue. Now you have freedom because with four hires, admin, delivery, marketing and sales, you can now go on vacation and have somebody else generate awareness of your business. Have somebody else talk to them and bring them into your world and enroll them into your service and then onboard them into your product or service in your business without you being there for hires and you start to have freedom. The fifth rung of the ladder is flow. And the reason why I call it that is because having a leader that partners with you on your business to help you with strategy and outcomes. And that's the key. If you hire them and tell them what to do, then you hire the wrong person. But if they can come in and help own outcomes to drive the business forward, to come up with the strategies and manage the execution and design the playbooks, that is when you start to feel the flow of really building a partnership and a business that you don't grow to hate. Most people have a hard time delegating because they're worried that it's going to lose the magic, the thing that you do your fingerprint on the business. And that's why I use the 108010 rule. So the 108010 rule is used by all the top people, people like Gary V. Elon Musk or even Mr. Beast, because they can't be involved in every aspect of the business, but they know how to ensure that their fingerprint and their genius is involved, which is I sit down with my team at the beginning and I do the ideation 10% that upfront. Let's talk about how this could work, all the resources we have, what we've done in the past, that feels similar. And make sure I give the team all I know about the ideation of the specific outcome I want. If it' marketing, if it's creating something, it's a customer result, a new website. I only get involved in that first 10%. The next 80% is your team doing the execution, them going through all the resources you might told them about, doing the interviews, essentially managing the whole project and they take that over from you. And then the last 10%, that's the integration. That's where they take the project back into your world and you look at it and you go, ooh, let's tweak this, let's tweak that, let's tweak this. And then you decide to present it back. Think Steve Jobs, he goes into the design studio with Johnny Ives and they come up with the idea for the new iPhone. The team goes and prototypes and builds the thing and sources the materials and puts it together. And then Steve came back at the very end, the last 10%, which is presenting it on stage. When they reveal the iPhone, that is how you take creative processes and integrate it with your team where you still feel involved but not needed to execute. Now let's start with level one of the replacement ladder. What do you get your admin to do? Which brings us to chapter six, Clone yourself. My mind blew wide open in the moment I got to spend a week with Richard Branson in Verbier, Switzerland. I watched a billionaire every other billionaire wants to be like, live his life, operate 400 companies by just meeting with his assistant for 60 to 90 minutes every morning for breakfast. That transformed everything for me, for who I thought I needed to be or resources I needed in my life to actually allow myself to live life to the fullest. And that's when I really realized million dollar companies were not built on $10 tasks. Task. It's impossible. There's not enough hours in the week for you to work your way through this problem. You have to learn how to work through somebody else. So there's two key areas that I require an administrative assistant to own. The first one is your inbox. And I know some of you still want to hold on to this and triage for them, but the truth is, is the moment you give them 100% access, your life will change. My brother went through this scenario himself where he hired an assistant and decided to just cc her on some emails to get her to do things instead of actually allowing her to process. Your inbox is actually your assistant's to do list if you give them access any other way and it doesn't work because they don't have the context to actually help support you. The second one is your calendar. 100%. I don't put anything in my calendar. My assistant owns it. How can I ask her to be responsible for my time and the effectiveness? Making sure that every day just feels like I'm producing at the highest level and staying in my production quadrant if I don't give them full access. Most people have a hard time figuring out all the things that you should give your executive assistant to do. So if you want my personal playbook on on everything detailed in regards to templates, structures, best practices and canned responses, then just find me on Instagram @danmartel2 Elza Martell and message me the word podcast EA and I'll send you a direct link to my Google Doc So you can copy and paste that for your own needs. So now that you have your first hire made, how do you transfer things onto their plate without going crazy? Which brings us to chapter number seven, building playbooks. I don't know if you've ever seen the McDonald way, but it's essentially their standard operating procedure for how they run McDonald's, Donald's. Every aspect from how they cook the fries to make all the different burgers essentially is documented. And they've created a system that any 14 year old kid with no training or hardly any training can hit buttons and have that burger taste the exact same in New York City or Melbourne, Australia. It is pretty wild. What I want you to consider is how do you create your version of that? James Clear has this great quote that summarizes this philosophy, which is people don't rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their system. So you might have big visions and goals for your business, but if you don't have the systems in place and your team can't support you on achieving those goals. And that's why I created the four Cs of playbooks that my team uses every day. The first one is camcorder, essentially recording yourself doing the work. Anytime I'm creating slides or working on an edit or an outline, I record myself talking out loud about what I'm doing. Because someday, maybe, hopefully soon, I'll be able to hire somebody to take that part over. So again, I could be an editor, not an author. The second is course. What you want is a detailed document of how to perform a task. So for example, I have a financial team. They have a detailed list of all the processes that they use to get the books balanced, to do accounts receivable, to pull the reports for the different team leads. And essentially it's a course in the document that outlines everything so that it's easy to follow. Number three is cadence. Think about every area of your business has a cadence for doing things. Every hour, every day, every week, or every month on a daily basis. It could be posting your stuff on social media on a weekly basis. It could be pulling the report to see if any of the stuff is working on a monthly basis. It's coming up with the ideas for the next month. Number four is checklists. And this is one of my favorites because essentially it's a high level checklist of the things that should have been done. If somebody goes to complete something, think about the difference between a pilot doing a checklist taken off in the plane versus learning how to fly the plane. How to fly the plane is like the course. And then the checklist is what a pilot uses to make sure that there's air in the tire before they take off. They're not going to learn how to fill up the tire with air in the checklist. That's like a final checklist, which is completely different from the playbook in the course. But now that you got your time back, how should you structure your day? Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martel Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martel method.com which brings us to chapter eight, your perfect week. One of my friends, every time I call him, he always answers, which makes me wonder, how busy is it? This dude? I don't know about you, but I like to get a lot of things done, which means that I've allocated my time, which means when I'm doing it, I don't answer my phone because I can't take the disruption. There's this great quote that says if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Meaning that if you've got a lot of stuff you want to do with your life, you need to design your week. That's why I created this framework called the Perfect Week, which is designing the outline of all the things that you want to have happen in a week that would tell you you had an incredible week. I always look at a few key areas of my life. First off, I look at my big rocks. I want to know what are the things when it comes generating revenue or income in my life, or maintaining the relationships or maintaining my body. These are big rocks, and those gotta go first into the outline of my perfect week. The second is I'm always looking to grab different types of moments where I could batch work together two, three hours of time to just get it all done at the same time. The third is I'm always scheduling my calendar for energy. I know in the morning I've got more head space to do creative work and really connect to my creator. Whereas in the afternoon, because I have a little bit of a lull from an energy point of view, that's when I do all my calls. I want to talk to people, I want to be around people. So understanding how your energy flows is a game changer. And the fourth thing is, once I look at my perfect week, I'm always trying to figure out how can I have net time. Net time stands for no extra time. Anytime I can bring two things together. So, for example, every Tuesday I do a founders hike where I allow anybody in the world to come hike with me to ask me questions. So that way I'm not splitting up my day doing coffee meetings all the time. I like to take travel time. I'll invite team members to travel with me so I can cross train them and pour into them to make sure that they get trained up. I've never had dinner with one person on one, ever. I've always invited three or four other people because my conversation might not take the whole two hours. And then they can get some value from meeting other people and I get to hear what's going on in everybody's life. So these are all opportunities to find net time. You have to design your life because either happens by design or it happens by default. And if you don't design it yourself, other people will take from it. But even with a structure, you might still be wasting your time. Which brings us to chapter nine, the only four time hacks you need. I'll just make these quick because they're so freaking powerful. The first one is 50 to fix it. Everybody and any one of my companies has a $50 budget to fix any problem they see fit. And the only rule is they have to tell their leader, no questions asked, they will always get paid back. The second one is repeat agenda. For a lot of meetings, like my executive assistant meeting that I have every day, or my weekly meeting with my wife that I have every week, I have a repeat agenda system. And I always update it or refine it if I feel like there's certain topics that we're not covering that need to be reviewed on a specific cadence. The third is definition of done. And this is the most powerful. It's asking yourself the question, when you delegate, what does done look like? You can just start with that question when you delegate and you're very descriptive to the person that's doing the work for you, usually you give them all the nuance in the context for them to be incredibly successful on the criteria that you're looking for to have that thing done. The fourth is the 131 rule, and this one will change your life. Essentially, people at the front line have the most context to solve a problem. So if you're a leader and you're allowing people to come to you with their problems, you're always giving them the answer. You're actually doing a Disservice because you don't have as much information as they do. What I like to do is say to the person, hey, I need you to bring me the one challenge that we're talking about. Second is three viable options. And the last one is one recommendation. And guess what, 99.9% of the time it's what we go with. Most entrepreneurs don't feel comfortable having their team members make decisions for them because they don't feel like they evaluated all the different things that you would. So having them state it and do the research and come back to you makes you feel comfortable with their recommendation. You teach people to just solve the problem and moving the business forward. That's how you avoid a bottleneck. See bottlenecks that because they're always at the top and you're the person that's causing them. Now that you understand how to lead people, how do you get the right ones in the door? Which brings us to chapter 10, the test first hiring method. I got this strategy talking to Seth Godin. We're looking over my new startup, Clarity. He was giving me advice. We're talking about team members. And he says to me, when it comes to team members, I can't work with them until I work with them. And it occurred to me that most people hire folks that they've never worked with. They've never worked on a project or evaluated their chemistry and they just go from interview to the person being in their life full time, which is a wild concept. It's like not even dating a girl and going straight to marriage. So here's how to hire a players. The first step is you have to be clear. That's going back to the time audit and figuring out who can buy you the most time out of your calendar for the least amount of money. That then drives revenue or efficiency. The second step is to cast your net. And this is all about ensuring that you have your team support the job promotion. You pay to run ads against a job post, call for referrals. But essentially you want to make sure you get as many people as possible to apply for that role. The third is you have to filter fast. And for me it's a one minute video answering two questions. If they can't answer those two questions in that one minute and they come in with three or four or five minute videos, that's a quick filter that they can't read instructions or they don't know how to use technology. The fourth is profile assessment. I use this to both understand the behavior, their defaults for how they show up on teams and then also their cognitive score to see how well can they actually pattern match and try to solve problems. Because unfortunately, some people's brains don't work the same as everybody else. Number five is test project. And this is simulating the work. It's one of my favorite things I do. So before I work with somebody, I have them do a test project that is the exact type of work they would do on my team. That's what everybody should do. You should simulate the actual work and have all the candidates do the exact same project so you can evaluate them against each other. Number six is sell the future. And my whole thing there is talk about their vision for their five years. What do they want to accomplish, who do they want to become, what do they want to get paid? I sell the possibility of that coming true and then I try to scare them them away because I don't want them to take a job because they need a job. I want them to take the job because they want the job. Now that you know how to get them in, how do you get the most out of them? Which brings us to chapter 11, transformational leadership. I had one person on my finance team come to me and ask me about expenses and costs, are putting a budget together, and they're like, do you know what it costs? And I said, now do I know? Probably, maybe. But if I tell them, then guess what? Every time they have a question about budgets, they're going to come to me. I'm not teaching them to go fish. And too often people hire folks and then do their job for them. So there's two types of lead leaders. There's transactional and transformational. A transactional leader tells somebody what to do, checks that it got done, and then tells them what to do next. It's called the tell check next doom loop. Because if you keep doing that, you'll always be the person that has to do it. Which means at about 12 employees, you wake up in the morning and you spend your whole day just keeping everybody busy and you don't get anything done on your project list versus transformational leadership is completely different. I start with the outcome. The outcome is get a budget put together so that the leadership team can make decisions about the financial state of the business. When you have that done, it is done. Two is measure. Measure how they're making progress. Tell me where you're at from a percent complete on creating the budget and send me a text message every hour, every day, depending how long the project will take so that we Know that you're on pace to get it done within a reasonable amount of time. Three is to coach coaches. If you feel like somebody is delaying themselves, write it down and next time you do a one on one meeting with them, coach them up. The more you do this, it might feel slow at first, but it is so much faster down the road because then people aren't staring at you to get their work work done. They understand the vision you have and the outcomes that they own and they're going to drive towards them. So that's why I teach the coach framework. So I break it into three core parts. The first one of the coaches co, which stands for core issue. When I'm working with somebody, I'm going to pull up one specific issue that I feel if I can help them overcome will have a force multiplier effect in their life and their ability to execute and be effective on the team. The second is I like to use an actual story of when I learned how to do the thing that I'm going to coach them up on because then it makes it real, it provides context, it creates the glue for them to go, oh my leader's human and he's also faced this and it's really cool that he shares with me a little bit vulnerability of where he wasn't great at it. Then the third part is change and that is all about getting them to commit to some aspect of change. I'll turn it on them and ask them based on what I shared, what are you going to change in your behavior going forward? And that's where I get commitment. Once you coach that way, you will never do it differently because when you build your people, the people build the business. But leading people isn't easy without trust. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work. Go. Follow me on Instagram Dan Martel2el Martel on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you there. Have an amazing day. Which brings us to chapter 12, the F word that will save you your business. Sometimes I can be an idiot. One time I was on a Zoom call and there's this guy Jacob on the team that ran all of our automation and I was a little frustrated with him for not getting things done on time and somebody else on the call brought up his name about them having to Wait for him to get back to them, and I'm talking crap about him. And then all of a sudden somebody else in the call says, hey, I just want you to know Jacob's on the call. So, yeah, I had to apologize. And I use this specific principle to help have that conversation. It's called the clear principle. It's essentially a conversation format that I use to remove any frustration you might have with your team members and them with you. Because if there's emotional venom that's piling up and then all of a sudden you don't trust somebody, you're micromanaging them, and they're always talking back to you in meetings, it creates a very hostile environment that you could literally clear all that emotional angst by just having this conversation. So C stands for create a warm environment. I want you to get one on one with the person, appreciate them for coming into the meeting and having the conversation with you and just making sure you set the environment to be warm and approachable. And lead with empathy. The L stands for lead them to offering feedback. This is where I share with somebody that I want to be a better leader for them, and I can't do that if I don't get feedback. And the only way is if they're honest with me. And asking for them to share feedback with me is the key to starting this conversation. E stands for emphasize. Emphasize means to restate to them when they give you that feedback, what you heard. And then A stands for ask if there's more. Most people will say there's nothing big or they'll bring something small up. And when you say, is there anything big else? Usually they know and they're wondering if you were actually willing to listen. R stands for reject or accept. I'm not saying because somebody gave me feedback, I have to accept it every time. They might say, you're an. And I go, I don't know if I agree. So essentially, it's your opportunity to say, I just want to give you some perspective on why I made that decision. That might be a rejection. Or you might say, I accept that feedback. And based on that, going forward, I'm going to make a commitment to change these things in the future. To me, feedback becomes the ability to inoculate resentment. Without it, everybody's thinking it, but they've never said it. And if you specifically as a leader, don't create the space for people to give you honest feedback, how are you going to get better? You may not realize that there's something you're doing that's Frustrating everybody. But because you've never asked, they don't want to tell you. And it means that your team's underperforming. It creates the foundation of trust. But now that you've built trust with your team, how do you get them to dream even bigger? Which brings us to chapter 13. Dream big, achieve bigger. One of my clients called me from New York City and he said, hey, Dan, other than this call right now, I've got my whole week open. Buying back my time was the coolest thing ever. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I was just like, oh, I'm sorry, you must not have read my book and understood what I'm talking about. Because my whole point of buying back your time is to build your empire. See, I think everybody should lean into building the biggest life they possibly can not live the easiest life. Empire stands for building a life of unlimited creation you never have to retire from. I want you to come up with crazy ideas and build that. So that's why I created these three phases to a 10x vision. Phase number one is dream without limits. Most people dream so small, it never has a potential to move them. If you dream really big, it makes your daily decision so much easier because you can evaluate. Will this bring me closer to my vision? Will this bring me closer to my dream? And if it doesn't, you say no. And you keep searching for the thing that's going to help make that happen. Phase two is you want to create a clear vision. When I think of a clear vision, there's four core areas I look at. I ask myself, what kind of team do I want to work with? Who are the people that would be around me that inspire me? What kind of business do I want to create? The vibe, the culture, the vehicles, the travel, the customers you're working with. How do you want all that to be part of a bigger empire that not only creates a world class living for you, but also creates a platform for everybody that you care about in your team to also become wealthy and the lifestyle. And for me, this is about the integrated life. How do I want my kids to interact? How do I want my family to be involved? How do I want it to just be my life? Not I work and then I do life. It's your ability to impact your local community and have your team members be involved in that. The whole package brings you to create a clear vision. Phase three is live in it. I want you to visualize your dream life. I want you to visualize the creation of it. What does it feel like what are the conversations you're having? Think about the experiences that you're going to create and just be in the energy of having received. Because if you can't feel it, you can't create it. Your frequency is what you frequently see. Now that you've got that vision, how do you actually execute on it? Which brings us to chapter 14, the preloaded year. Most people overestimate what they can get done in a year and underestimate what they can get done in a decade. The truth is, if you plan right, you can get more done in a year than you do in a decade. But it's going to require a completely different strategy. Number one is rocks, pebbles and sand. If you had a jar and you were trying to load a bunch of big rocks and pebbles and sand and water into the jar, but you started with the water in the sand, by the time you got to the pebbles in the rock, there wouldn't be enough room for everything. But if you start with the big rocks and you place two or three big rocks in that jar and then the pebbles all around and you shake the jar a little bit and it kind of settles in, then you pour the sand in slowly and it kind of fills in all the rest of the space. And then you have a whole glass of water and you pour that in the jar and the whole thing fits easily. That's the idea of planning your year. The second thing is to add maintenance. This is looking at things in your life that you know are best practices so that you stay on top of them so they don't become an issue. I mean, it's like if you're feeling dehydrated, by the time you feel like you got to drink something, you're about 20 minutes too late. So you're better off just scheduling the time that you stay hydrated so that you don't get behind. I think about my weekly meetings with my wife as like, a family meeting. My quarterly retreats with her so that we disconnect, to reconnect. My board meetings with my kids, that's what I call them, but these very dedicated, ritualistic experiences where I know that I have this time in my calendar and it's a priority. So I'm not trying to repair things because I allowed relationships to strain because I was so busy on work. The third is to work, to plan, to go all in and say, this is my plan for the year. Here's what I've committed to. These are my priorities, and I'm going to execute even if I don't Feel like it. Number four is to review and adjust. My wife and I have been doing this for almost a decade, and at the end of the year, we always take time to review everything we did the previous year and ask yourself a simple question. Would we do it again or should we just take it out of the calendar? I mean, it's either an F. Yeah, this lit us up. Want to do more of that? Or it was meh and meh is good, and good isn't great. So we decided to cancel that and create space for us to evaluate new opportunities. So every year we adjust, we review, and I'm telling you, our years are getting pretty special. But it only happens if you plan it. It requires the preloaded year as a strategy. But what is this all really for? Which brings us to the conclusion the Buyback lifestyle. This is one of the most important chapters in the whole book because it shows what's possible. Entrepreneurs lose most of their productivity at home, not their office. Most people clean their home before the cleaning person comes over. Allow people to support you in your life. And just because your mom always did this or your dad always did that doesn't mean that you have to do it. This world we live in where you can literally out out task so many things in your home, from meal prep to groceries to running errands so that you can get all that time back, why wouldn't you take advantage of it? So these are the four levels of the buyback life. Level one is cleaning and errands. If you have the means, you should have somebody that cleaned your house. I had a client that had a hard time with this, and I said, do you want to create employment in your community? Because you continue to hold on to running errands and cleaning your house is missing the opportunity to create a job for somebody that requires really needs it. Level two is meals and supplies. Think about all the things that have to be replenished in your home. All of that could be hours a week gotten back for very little investment. Level three is family support. Now, I know that this one will be a little tough because you're a parent and you're supposed to do this stuff, but somebody else can drive your kids to school in the morning. Somebody else can pick them up back in the day. Those people were just part of your family. But because we all live in different places, you may not have them in your city anymore. And it's okay to pay somebody else to come in and take over the role that maybe a mom or grandma. Grandma used to play in the past level four is projects and ownership. And this is the coolest, highest level you can get to, which is have somebody that acts like the CEO of your family, somebody that takes over all the projects, all the real estate, all the car stuff, the maintenance, everything, all your travel. Have somebody else own it so that you can do one or two things. That's where I live my life. I either spend time with people I love or I go do things to create value in the world that only I can do. Those are the only two things that you will see me do because I love it and everything else, I'm willing to buy back my time for it. I understand Learning to let go is the hardest thing in the world. There is emotional shrapnel involved in it. There's the fear that somebody's going to make you look bad. There's the fear that somebody's going to cost you your whole business. These are all real fears. What I want to invite you to consider is that on the other side of doing the work is a world of freedom. That you have no idea that you could live, that you're allowed to live, that you could live sooner than you ever thought possible. And it requires you to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Thanks for listening to Martel Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom and build their empire.