Buy Back Your Time

About

• From The Only Productivity Books Entrepreneurs Need In 2026:
• PDF online - https://library.grinternationalschool.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Buy_Back_Your_Time_-_Dan_Martell-340-1.pdf
• NOT an entry level business book. You can hire only when you have stable revenue, probably when you are around $1M
• Transcendence: maybe if someone is really good, they can 'hire to free up their time' without having revenue yet. That is probably called 'partnership' or 'cofounders' etc. Very difficult for extreme outliers.
• Workbook here - [1]
• Dan Martell is called Humanity's Biggest Cheerleader - https://www.danmartell.com/

Preface

'LEARNING HOW TO buy back my own time has created an incredible life. This week I’ll spend six hours growing my eight-figure business. I’ll train for an Ironman. I’ll volunteer with inner-city youth. I’ll write my next book. I’ll look for my next investment. I’ll give my attention and resources to the atrisk entrepreneurs who give me so much energy and joy. Best of all, I’ll spend time with my kids, eat lunch with my wife, and the four of us will enjoy dinner together . . . every night. None of that has come because I simply grinded harder. All of it has come because I learned to think and act differently inside my company, so that every moment invested in it has allowed me to withdraw more energy from it.'

k1

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. —james clear[1]

The little-known secret to 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. Likely, two to three tasks fit that description. Every other task you’re handling is slowing your growth and sucking the life from you, and you should clear it from your calendar. Yes, someone else should be handling about 95 percent of your current work so you can get back to what matters.

• Ok, but BS. What if you ARE better than anyone else around you at multiple tasks, including ones that don't give most energy? and instead just consider how you’d feel if you were only executing what you’re better at than everyone else, what you truly love, and what adds a crazy amount of value to your business.. Key is there - better than anyone else AND truly love at the same time.
• Buyback Principle - That’s what the Buyback Principle is all about: 1. How to spend the most finite asset your business possesses: the founder’s time. 2. How to invest that time into what will bring the founder more energy and more money. Hiring is reinvestment - critical thing is to hire specifically to buy back time. In short: The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
• Typical objections - I don’t have the time. I can’t afford the help. No one’s as good at the work as I am. No one wants to do the work. I can’t find good people to hire.
• James Clear - “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.
• Tom Clancy, one of the bestselling novelists of all time, employed writers to produce dozens of books under his name over the last two decades of his career.
• 
• Or look at Warren Buffett. He spends his time on two primary tasks: reading books and searching for the next investment opportunity. His Berkshire Hathaway empire is approaching $1 trillion in value and employs nearly four hundred thousand people around the world.
• Audit: What tasks do I hate doing that are easy and inexpensive to offer someone else? Transfer: Who do I have on my team—or who can I hire, even part-time—to take these over? Fill: What tasks should I focus on that I love doing that can immediately bring more money to my company?

Summary

1. The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
2. You can’t personally outwork yourself to a better business. The problem is you only have twenty-four hours a day. Eventually, if you’re doing everything, you (or one of your relationships) will break down.
3. If you keep grinding, you’ll eventually hit the Pain Line, where you’re experiencing so much pain when you try to grow that you’ll do one of three things: stall it, sabotage it, or sell it.
4. When you hit the Pain Line, it should act as a feedback loop—this is your opportunity to embrace a new mindset or to continue on in the status quo, waiting for something to snap.
5. 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 yo

k2

• If hire out to do 80%, when is 80% insufficient?

Intended Outcomes

• What do you do when it is difficult to hire for the specific thing you need? Such as if nobody can do it? Keep doing -> then train someone from scratch?
• Be careful about self-sabotage with growth. Pain Line - subconsciously keep from pain by sabotage.
• Hire somebody in customer support way more empathic than I and shoot customer service way up
• Speechwriter to synthesize presentations more powerfully than I
• Product developer better than I to handle due diligence, where i provide only systems design.
• Transition fully to systems design, to partake in usufruct of finished products that I can use (CNCs, cars, open source private jet, microchip fab, good food, lifetime products, etc)

Links

• 10x vision map - [2]

Strategies

• Stacking Functions - Partner with someone who does something for you for free because they offer complementary services (they ride on your coattails)