Dan Martell - Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Martell, Dan (Business consultant), author.

Title: Buy back your time : get unstuck, reclaim your freedom, and build your empire / Dan Martell.

Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022029414 (print) | LCCN 2022029415 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593422977 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593422984 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Time management. | Entrepreneurship. | Success in business.

Classification: LCC HD69.T54 M3794 2023 (print) | LCC HD69.T54 (ebook) | DDC 650.1/1dc23/eng/20220624

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029414

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029415

Cover design: Ming Hsun Yu

Book design by Tanya Maiboroda, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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To Rene, Max, and Noah, you are my everything.

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I STARED AT THE GUN in my duffel bag.

If I just point it at these cops, theyll end my miserable life for me.

Wiping the sweat from my eyes, I peered into the rearview mirror. Two armed police officers were racing toward my car. Id just led them on a high-speed chase and crashed into the side of a house. Theyd finally caught up and had every reason to fire on sight. It was game over.

Hopelessness flooded me. Memories of a lifetime of troubled antics. Shoplifting in grade school. Stints in group homes in middle school. Getting booted from high school.

When my mom found drugs, money, and stolen guns at our house, shed finally had enough and called the cops. But my brother Pierre tipped me off, so instead of waiting around to get arrested, I took the $63 he offered and went on the run, hiding in hunting camps and crashing on friends couches. Finally, after weeks of trying to stay one step ahead of the police, I decided to leave my small Canadian town of Moncton, New Brunswick, and head to Montreal, where my uncle lived.

I stole a car and left townbut I didnt get far. I was on the road only a short time when I hit a random roadblock. Feeding the cops a bogus story about forgetting my drivers license, as soon as they turned their backs to look up my info in their computer, I gunned the engine and sped away.

The next few minutes were like a car chase out of a movie: slamming the accelerator, pounding the horn, weaving in and out of trafficbefore finally crashing into the side of a house.

Thats when I reached for the gun.

But it got stuck as I tried to remove itjammed somehow. I yanked and yanked, but it wouldnt budge. Then the cops yanked me into their cruiser.

Fast-forward to a six-month sentence in an adult jail because of the severity of my crimes. I tried to keep to myself and stay out of trouble, but old habits die hard, and eventually I ended up getting into a fight that landed me in solitary confinement. Finally, after spending almost seventy-two hours alone in my underwear, Brian, a guard, entered my cell.

Come on, he said. He led me to a side room, ushered me inside, then locked the door. I looked around at the room, realizing that this was one of the few areas without cameras.

My heart was in my throat. Brian stared at me, and after a long pause, he asked a simple but profound question:

Dan, why are you here?

Well I got in a fight with Kirk at breakfast

He cut me off. No, I mean, why are you in jail?

I stammered, offering a few feeble answers: I stole a car. I ran from the cops

Brian interrupted me. No, Dan. Ive been here for almost ten years, and Ive met a lot of kids. A lot. But I see you trying to do your homework and stay out of trouble. Youre different. It doesnt make sense to me. You dont belong here.

Hot tears came pouring down my face as Brian explained that he thought I was meant for something else. Until that day, Id only ever heard what a troublemaker I was. But somehow Brian saw potential in me. And his words gave me hope for a better life.

Looking back now, I can see that throughout my troubled childhood, I had always shown potential: I was creative, I was willing to take risks, I was good at talking to people, and I could deal with the chaos around me without losing my cool. In essence, I had shown the necessary skills to be an entrepreneurbut my skill set just hadnt been pointed in the right direction.

My next stop proved to be pivotal. Not long after my conversation with Brian, I was sent to Portage, a therapeutic facility for teens. There, my transformation continued. I studied and worked hard at the tasks I was given. Along the way, I befriended a maintenance guy, Rick, who became like a big brother to me. One day, I was helping Rick clean out one of the abandoned cabins when I found a book on Java programming sitting next to an old computer. I opened it up and what I saw shocked me. I had always thought computer programming would look like hieroglyphics, incomprehensible lines of complex math equations. But this... this read like plain English. And it spoke to me.

So I powered up the computer and typed in commands, following the simple list of instructions from the first chapter of the manual. Minutes later, the program ran and these words appeared:

Hello World!

That was it. Something just clicked for me. Here was a way to create a set of instructions that allowed me to get the same reliable and predictable results. Every. Single. Time.

The predictability of software counteracted the unpredictable chaos I had been living with my whole childhood. From that day forward, writing code became my new addiction.

I soon found myself obsessed with design software and systems. Even today, when I teach clients to create systems for their companies, its a huge thrill to help people turn chaos into predictability.

At the time, I was naively proud of myselfI didnt realize that Hello World! is the first lesson in every beginners programming book. With unfounded confidence, I dove headfirst into this new advent, the Internet. I took the same skills that had gotten me into trouble my entire childhood and pointed them full force toward entrepreneurship.

In fact, my chaotic childhood proved perfect for the world of self-employmentthe unknown just didnt scare me. I opened my first legitimate business, a vacation rental site called MaritimeVacation, in 1998, when I was just eighteen. At twenty-one, I started my second business, NB Host, a hosting company for Web applications.