Buy Back Your Time

Buy Back Your Time

*Dan Martell*

At seventeen years old, Dan Martell was in the back of a police cruiser after leading officers on a high-speed chase in a stolen car. He had crashed into a house. In the duffel bag beside him was a gun that, by some mechanical failure, had not fired when he reached for it. They put him in adult jail. In solitary confinement, a guard named Brian stopped at his door and said something that nobody had ever said to him before: "You're different. You don't belong here." That sentence cracked something open in him. It was the first time in his life that someone had pointed at a different future and suggested it was genuinely available to him. He lay there in that cell, and for the first time, he believed it.

He found programming at Portage, a therapeutic facility for troubled teens. There was an old computer in the corner and a Java book beside it. He expected it to be incomprehensible, the kind of thing that existed for people smarter than him, people who had not spent the last several years destroying every good thing that came their way. Instead, it was plain English. He typed his first program and got "Hello World!" back on the screen. For a kid who had grown up in chaos, in a home defined by unpredictability and emotional volatility, the computer offered something extraordinary: cause and effect. You type this, you get that. Always. Every time. The predictability of software counteracted the unpredictable chaos he had been living with his whole childhood. Programming became his new addiction. A better one.

He built his first business at eighteen, a vacation rental site called MaritimeVacation. Then a hosting company. Then Spheric Technologies, a software firm he eventually sold for his first million. Then Flowtown, a San Francisco startup. Then Clarity, a marketplace connecting founders with advisors. And then SaaS Academy, a coaching company that started as a YouTube channel and grew into one of the best-known entrepreneur education businesses in the world. By the time he was running Spheric, his third company, he was logging fifteen to eighteen hour days, seven days a week. He thought that was what success looked like. He was wrong. Then, four months before his wedding, his fiancee dropped her engagement ring on the kitchen counter and said, "I can't do this anymore." He had grown a business. He had destroyed everything else.