How to Achieve Your Dream Life (Step by Step)

Your dream life is less than 12 months away and it begins with principles of success. And it's these principles that help me go from a broke 24-year-old to running my own business that generates over $100 million in revenue a year.
They help me find my dream wife, build amazing businesses, and love the work I do every day. And you can apply these today without having a rich family, getting lucky, or being early.
So I've distilled all these into nine principles to build your dream life. Welcome to the Martell Method.
I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.
My bestselling book, Buy Back Your Time is out now. Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.
Starting with principle number one, be willing to be misunderstood. Most people hold back because they're scared of being too much.
But the truth is, if you want to be extraordinary, you have to be okay with extra. It's in the word extraordinary.
The other day I was talking to one of my clients and he said to me, my wife doesn't support my growth. I feel like she's scared that our paths are going to divert and we'll be too far apart

or we're going to be different. And what I said to him is you have to be willing to go support

your wife, but also understand she may not understand what you're about to do. And that's

okay. Oftentimes your family are just too close to you to see your greatness and be okay with that.

Don't fight them for it. Just understand they've seen you grow up.
They've seen you at your worst.

I don't expect them to understand. I know that if I want to be the best at what I do and other people don't, that my weird dreams means a dream life.
That for other people, they can't comprehend why anybody would want to get up and be that driven to create if they've never touched it. When you're living your truth, you're also showing them where they've been living a lie.
And it's not their fault. Nobody's ever done that for them.
They need to see you the way they see you because it allows them to tell themselves a story for themselves that makes you the villain. And their opinion on you is not your business.
Nobody needs a change for me to achieve my dreams. Nobody has to be different.
Nobody has to give me approval. You need to have everybody in your life.
Understand every decision you make is what's going to slow you down. If you want to be extraordinary, you need to be extra.
But you can't achieve your dream life without defining it. Which brings us to principle number two, visualize your dreams.
Napoleon Hill, who wrote the book Think and Grow Rich, talks about this all the time. The concept is to have a primary aim.
If you don't have a target, how are you supposed to hit it? Most people say, I just want to be richer. I want to be happier.
I want to have more love. But when you say, what does that mean? They go, I don't know, just more.
More is not a strategy. Everything you see around you was first imagined in someone's mind.
They couldn't create this chair, this mic, the camera I'm using right now, if they didn't clearly see it in their mind. I call it the rule of 300%.
You want to have 100% clarity towards your target. I'm talking specifics.
I want you to tell me colors, tell me amounts, tell me where. Be 100% clear.
The second part is 100% belief. Can you have 100% belief that you can achieve it? Because if you're thinking about something you want, but then immediately tell yourself you can't do it, that's not going to work.
Then the last part of the 300% rule is 100% of the time. Can you have 100% clarity, 100% belief, 100% of the time? To your ability to have those three, you will attract into your life the thing you're after.
Just having the rule of 300 isn't enough. You also have to trigger your goals.
I do this by sitting down three times a day and looking at the things I want to achieve this year. I visualize them.
I get in the energy of achieving them. And I ask myself, is my calendar reflecting the priority of getting these things done? If not, I make a change.
To really have this concept settle in, I want you to think about this idea. If I put $10 million into your bank account, but you couldn't touch it for 10 business days, how would you feel tomorrow walking around the world knowing in 10 days you're going to receive $10 million tax-free? Would you walk around slowly or fast? Would you be upset or happy? Could other people make you upset or it would be impossible? Would you be excited about the future or pessimistic about it? My gut tells me you would have this energy of excitement and confidence and you'd be looking forward to the end of those 10 days.
Now, here's the gotcha. You have to act like that without that $10 million there.
If you act as if it's there, that energy will attract it into your life. Having the belief and being in that energy will create the opportunities around you for you to plug in and get those results.
But you can't get your dream life just thinking about it. Which brings us to principle number three, ask better questions.
As a coach, I realized the way I program my clients' minds is through my questions. Asking better questions gets them to reflect.
Then they come up with the answers and they build the plan. See, if they build the plan, they won't fight the plan.
If they tell me what they're going to do because I give them clarity through my questions, then they create the strategy they got to go execute. And it's not my fault if it doesn't work out.
It's their inability to do the work. So one of my favorite questions, for example, is if somebody bought your business tomorrow, what's the first thing that would change? Why haven't you made that decision yet? What's coming up for you? Questions I truly believe are the programming language of the mind.
Last year, I went to Date with Destiny, a Tony Robbins event with my wife, and there he teaches the idea of a primary question. And for me, the one I came up with that I use three, four, five times a day is how can I appreciate even more God's grace and guidance in this moment? And when I ask myself that question, everything gets better.
There's just something really powerful a question delivers when you asked it properly that resets our focus on our existence to bring ourselves to the present. As Tony often says, ask a better question, live a better life.
You're allowed to ask yourself a question like, what would need to be true for this experience to be even better? What would need to be true for me not to be fearful of making that decision? What would need to be true for me to be excited to go out and meet new people? The answer to those questions will give you the strategies that will get you those results. But if you just sit back and hope that somebody else does it for you, you will never move forward.
Albert Einstein said it best a long time ago, a problem well defined is a problem half solved. If you don't learn how to define your situation so that you can get it to a question that's clear, then you can't solve the problem.
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Find it at martellmethod.com. But your dream life won't materialize without movement.
Which brings us to principle number four, default to action. I get young men asking me every day on social media, how do I start a company? My answer is the same.
Sell something to a stranger. Well, what should I sell, Dan? It doesn't matter what you sell.
It is doing something versus thinking about it. The wealthiest people default to action.
They don't overthink things. They literally say, I'm going to make a decision, then make the decision right.
I don't wait until I make the right decision. As Wayne Gretzky famously said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
If today you overthink your situation and do nothing versus actually take a shot on goal, then by definition, it's like you didn't even try to take a shot. What changed for me in my life is when I realized that the only thing I needed to learn is shorten the distance between knowing and doing.
That's why I came up with this mantra, JFDI. It's a license plate on my cars.
It's my life philosophy. The end of the day, if my soul says yes, then I have to take action.
I was literally sitting on a book deal, a million dollar book deal that I almost didn't do, but I decided yes. Why? Because I already had all the information I need to make the decision.
I just was putting it off. There's no need for that.
Just say yes. Or it's a no.
Whatever it is, don't sit on it. Success is making decisions with imperfect data.
That's what the best people do. So, JFDI, you've got to close the gap between knowing and doing.
But action on its own won't create your dream life. Which brings us to principle number five, measure what matters.
Most people struggle getting a result in their life because they don't measure. I remember one time I was on a call with one of my friends and I could see in his face he had put on some weight and I just asked him, when's the last time he got on a scale? Now I know that may not sound nice, but I loved him too much not to ask.
And his response was, it's been a while. And that day, he will tell you that he went on a journey to transform his life.
His name is Matt Verlach. He is one of my best buds and business partners.
And if you saw the 60 pound heavier version of Matt on that Zoom call to who he is today running ultra marathons and triathlons and hitting the gym, he will tell you it was on the back end of that question and changing the fact that he measures. Not every week, but every day.
And not only his weight, but also his food and his workout routines. And I just learned a long time ago, what you focus on expands.
If you want to get rich, measure more. If you want to lose weight, measure more.
Every day you have a chance to improve your situation. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
Most people just hope. Hope is not a strategy.
Without measuring, you're just guessing. Increase the specificity and increase the frequency of what you measure and watch it grow, including your bank account.
Measuring every day brings positive expectancy around the outcome that you want and that energy is what makes it happen. But you can't create your dream life without focusing on this.
Which brings us to principle number six, focus. Follow one course until successful.
Every day I ask entrepreneurs, what do you do? And the ones that are small say, I do a few things. I have several businesses.
What they really want to say is I have one business that makes profit and six others that suck that profit dry. The thing that you will notice between people that are successful and wealthy versus ones that are still struggling is the wealthy person did one thing really well.
He pushed that boulder up the mountain. He put all of his resources behind that one arrow to hit the target.
Once he had product market fit, once he had a repeatable scalable model, then he diversified. Too often people hear diversification is how you create wealth.
No, wealth creation requires concentration and diversification is diversification. The truth is when you're starting, multiple streams of income will not make you rich.
You got to go all in on one opportunity. Be obsessed with mastery.
Deciding that one thing to do the 10,000 hours or better said dedicate 10 years. Dedicate a decade or what I call a dedicate.
If you show up every day to dedicate yourself to mastery around one business, it would be inevitable, impossible for you not to achieve your goal. And what you then learn is how to say no.
And a no is a yes to your dream. And a yes today without properly understanding what it is, is a no to your future.
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Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to principle number seven, play to win.
I have conversations with people every day that are talking about ways to save on taxes or things they can do to save their expenses or how they have this idea. They do this, this, and this, and they spend 10 hours to save $10.
And I'm like, what are you doing? I have friends that have moved countries to save taxes. To me, that is trying to play not to lose and not trying to play to win.
The big issue with that is that they don't realize they're telling themselves that they can't create more and instead they're trying to save what they have. Instead of trying to fear and minimize the downside, do enough to protect yourself, do enough to buy insurance, but any time spent above and beyond that versus going and creating more is actually negative energy.
If you focus on trying not to lose, guess what? You will lose. Just learn from the mistake and move on.
Learn how to create more value. Focus on abundance.
Be more valuable to other people and you will see more resource come into your life. Instead of moving to save taxes, ask yourself, how can I create more money to stay where I want to live? That's true freedom.
But you'll never achieve your real dream without accepting this next thing. Which brings us to principle number eight, you're already enough.
A while ago I was coaching this this woman and I asked her what her five-year goals were. And she told me to make a hundred million dollars.
And I said, cool, easy, but why? And she goes, so then I could tell everybody F you. I was like, to who? She's like, to every person that didn't believe in me.
I said, interesting. What's your revenue at now? She's like, 7 million.
I said, okay, you should Google what percent of women founded companies get to 7 million in revenue. She's like, well, I don't know.
It's like probably five, 6%. I'm like, nope, it's way less.
It's like 0.01%. So in many ways, you have already been able to tell them F you.
Why do you need a hundred million dollars to feel the way you want to feel at that level? And she got silent and she started to cry. Cause what she realized in that moment was all of the goals that you set for yourself are just a criteria to give yourself permission to feel enough.
And you actually have everything you need right now to feel that way. And I would argue being in that energy, truly believing that today would actually bring that future into your life even faster.
Your dream life doesn't need anyone's signature of approval. Just the fact that you're watching this tells me you're already enough, that you're here wanting to be better.
And that's the process. My coach says it this way.
He says you have to be blissfully dissatisfied. In this moment, you're allowed to be blissfully happy for everything you have and also realize that you have more to give the world.
And that is why we're here. We're here to create.
It's finding the happiness in the pursuit, not the pursuit of happiness. Now that you know the how, this last one will make sure you don't give up.
Which brings us to principle number nine, define your why. The reason I love to do the work I do is because I love helping people find their why.
The challenge is that most people don't want to go look for it because I learned a long time ago that every person's purpose, their reason for being alive, what they're meant to do, some people call it a divine assignment, sits right next to the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And it's because of that pain that they went through that actually shaped them uniquely to help another person overcome or avoid that in their life.
And they might think, well, I'm here to do this art or I'm here to create this, or I've got this business I'm building. And all those things can still be true.
But until you understand your big Y, capital Y, all caps, bolded, highlighted Y, and use that to be your North Star as you build, you'll always feel like you're not on the right journey. You'll always feel like you're missing something.
You'll always see other people that are following that and be a little jealous or be frustrated. Why do they have that pep in their step? Why do they show up that way? How do they have that level of excitement in their life? A Y is like the fuel of your success.
And for me, I have to reconnect the work I'm doing on a daily basis to a higher purpose. It's my why.
Without that, the energy that I use to create won't be felt by my audience. If I'm just going through the motions, you're not going to listen to this and take action.
You're going to be like, man, he's just reading from a script. There's no heart in that.
It's because I understand my purpose. A strong why will overcome

any how. And the truth is, is you don't have to save the world, but you can save your world.

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