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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Martell
Read between
February 17 - February 20, 2023
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.
core principle of mine is: learn, do, teach.
“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.”[1]
If you burn out, you’ll burn down their lives as well.
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
A UC Berkeley study showed that entrepreneurs are significantly more likely to report a lifetime history of depression, ADHD, substance abuse, and bipolar disorder.[2]
Even efficiently staying busy isn’t the answer.
reaching the next stage of your business is spending your time on only the tasks that: (a) you excel at, (b) you truly enjoy, and (c) add the highest value (usually in the form of revenue) to your business.
How to spend the most finite asset your business possesses: the founder’s time How to invest that time into what will bring the founder more energy and more money
continually use every resource you can to buy back your time.
Then, fill that extra time with activities that light you up with energy and make you more money.
emphasis isn’t simply on “hiring,” but on hiring with a pur...
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specifically to buy back his time.
The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
entrepreneurs shouldn’t be checking email unless they want to.
you excel at a few tasks, and you’re mediocre at best at the others.
when you’re choosing what to do today, you should be selecting the highest-value tasks.
Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
The Pain Line is the point at which growth becomes impossible.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, the Pain Line occurs right at about twelve direct reports and just over $1 million in revenue.
Entrepreneurs don’t usually recognize when they’re self-sabotaging. Every time they reach their Pain Line, they sabotage their company’s growth until it gets back to a level they can safely oversee. They make sudden decisions:
a decision to not grow is a decision to slowly die.
if you don’t evolve, your customers will leave for a better option.
the worst possible outcome of stalling isn’t just your customers leaving you, but your employees leaving you.
change your perspective from thinking that more business growth = more pain to knowing that more business growth = more freedom
by doing too many tasks himself, he was keeping others (like the head of engineering he ultimately hired) from getting paid to do work they’re world-class at performing.
“Winners and losers have the same goals,” he writes. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
A Buyback Loop occurs as you continually audit your time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking your energy. Then you transfer those tasks, optimally, to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them. Lastly, you fill your time with higher-value tasks that light you up and make you more money. Then you start the process over again.
Moments of pain are often the perfect opportunities to upgrade our thinking and begin a Buyback Loop that changes our life.
audit-transfer-fill
Wearing all these hats may be inevitable at an early stage of your company.
Time is the currency, the vehicle allowing you to purchase what you love or what you hate.
when entrepreneurs are executing tasks in their individual zones of genius, they’re able to apply their unique, innate talents, and it’s the “entry gate to the garden of miracles.”
Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love, and only what they love.
Many entrepreneurs hire away the parts of their business they love the most. This typically happens accidentally—as they grow, they don’t hire to buy back their time, they hire for a position or role, mistakenly making themselves the administrator of their own company.
where a founder’s chaos addiction presents itself.
“Want to host a webinar in front of an audience full of your target customers?”
When these opportunities pop up for the Staller, they never take them, and they also never say no.
When you are falling prey to the Speed Demon: You haphazardly hire the first candidate you find (whether it’s an aunt, a friend, or the mailman). You forcefully select the first technology platform you find (even if it doesn’t fit your needs). You go with the first lender available (regardless of other, better options).
“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”[8]
3 | THE SUPERVISOR When you hire someone and then do their job for them, you’re in danger of the Supervisor.
Without any explanation from their boss, they have no idea how he diagnosed the problem and fixed my bike. Every time they have an opportunity to learn something new, their boss inadvertently takes that opportunity away from them.
training for growth.
Simon Bowen—a world-class ideator who helps leaders develop a curriculum around their expertise so they can systematically teach it to others. I offered to introduce them. I told Kyle that he would probably charge less than $10,000 to help him put together a curriculum.
The problem with being excellent at fixing problems is that you’ll want to fix them . . . even when they don’t exist.
The Staller won’t let you move past big decisions. The Speed Demon ensures you keep making the same mistakes. The Supervisor ensures your time never upgrades, meaning you’ll spend more and more frustrating hours on tasks that you’re only mediocre at, at best. The Saver is tricky—he tells you to save your money, costing you time. You agonize over a $100 purchase that could have saved you ten hours.
the 5 Time Assassins, being the greedy little trolls that they are, will try to zap any newfound time and energy.
Time Assassins come for you, they’ll disguise themselves in justifications. You’ll think you have reasons for acting rashly. You’ll feel the urge to fire an employee because “they deserved it.” You’ll suddenly change your website because you want to “stay fresh,” or you’ll overeat because “it was a long week.”
75 Hard,
What’s the biggest chunk of time you spend each week on something you hate doing, which just feels like work to you?” It turned out Andre was spending 80 percent of his time on computer-aided drafting,
