I Quit Alcohol for 4,700 Days, and It Made Me Rich

4,700 days ago, I quit drinking and it made me rich.

When my wife got pregnant, I wanted to break the cycle of addiction in my family and I honestly thought I was just trying to be a better father.

But here's what I never expected.

That decision didn't just change my family life.

It unlocked a level of wealth I never imagined possible.

Look, I get it.

You're probably thinking this guy's lost his freaking mind.

How does not drinking alcohol create wealth?

Well, let me put this in perspective for you.

In the 13 years since I quit drinking, I've built several businesses that generate over over $100 million in revenue every single year.

I've achieved financial freedom I never thought possible, gotten the best shape of my life, and even gotten the privilege of mentoring thousands of kids in my local community.

And I'm about to prove to you that quitting drinking wasn't just about being a better father.

It became the catalyst for building massive wealth.

Welcome to the Martel Method.

I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.

And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martelmethod.com.

Most people think wealth comes from what you add to your life, new strategies, new habits, new opportunities.

No, no, no, no.

What I discovered is sometimes the most important thing you can do is subtract.

Remove the one thing that's been sabotaging your potential this entire time.

So the first thing, instant energy boost equals immediate productivity gains.

The most immediate change was energy.

and energy is everything in business.

More energy means I could actually do the thing that makes money.

No more wasting my freaking mornings because I'm hungover.

No more dragging myself through the day.

That's how money started showing up.

The math is simple.

When you're not drinking, you're not hungover.

When you're not hungover, you get at least two extra productive hours every single day.

Think about it.

You wake up, you attack the morning.

How does that compound?

Look at the math.

Two hours times 365 days equals 730 extra hours per year.

That energy, that focus, it'll change everything for you.

Over the 13 years that I've done that, that's 9,000 extra productive hours gained.

Those hours became revenue activities, learning new skills, building relationships, creating content, starting new businesses.

Energy is the foundation that everything else sits on top of.

How I show up, how people feel me is going to dictate if they trust me.

If I'm trying to hire somebody, they're going to look me in the eyes.

If they're bloodshot and I look tired, they're not going to trust me.

If I'm trying to close a deal with a partner, they're going to look at my energy.

If I'm low energy and I feel depleted, like they're not going to trust that I'm going to deliver for them.

See, I truly believe that like my energy is how I see the world.

Your frequency is what you frequently see.

If your energy zapped, you will not see the opportunities all around you.

The second lesson was about decision-making clarity.

Clear mind, better choices, and better choices make more money.

And this one almost cost me everything to learn.

Making business decisions with a clouded mind equals rushing roulette with your future.

There's literally no consistency.

You hope to make progress, but you can't count on it because you don't have the clarity of thought.

One of the best things one of my coaches taught me was the concept of pulling vocabulary.

If my mind's not clear, I can't connect to the words that I need in this moment to deliver this message.

How effective am I going to be right here, right now if I've got a clouded mind?

My ability to tell stories and analogies and metaphors and make points and teach and share all those things at the right level right now with the energy, not gonna happen.

And sobriety for me meant the ability to show up fully present for every opportunity.

It didn't matter if it was the last minute, I showed up with the energy.

I showed up with the clear mind.

I've heard Jeff Bezos say this several times that when he wakes up, he putters, clear mind.

And his belief is that he only has to make one to two great, meaningful decisions per day.

One or two decisions that are going to shape the future of one of the wealthiest people in the world.

And how are you going to do that if you don't have a clear mind?

If you've got a vice that you've been holding on to, that's going to cloud your decision and that guilt is going to actually affect your ability to make decisions.

And honestly, this showed up in a big way in 2005 when I was running my company Spheric Technologies.

In my book, Buy Back Your Time, I tell the whole story because it became a time assassin for me.

It became a place where I was self-medicating and it was sucking up all my time.

I was working in New Haven, Connecticut for Yale University, a massive opportunity, deploying some new software.

I decided to go out, go to this incredible sushi restaurant, and drink sake all night, close the restaurant down, and I'm walking home cross-eyed.

The next day, I was supposed to show up for the team.

I didn't.

That almost cost me the deal.

I literally risked my whole team.

I've seen this happen over and over again where people don't realize their lack of clarity is going to cost them bigger things than just their own downside on their own life.

It's going to impact other people.

This was my realization.

Drinking is sabotaging my biggest career opportunities.

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Number three, network upgrades.

Lesson three is a big one because I always knew my network is my net worth.

But quitting drinking got me around higher caliber people and that grew my income fast.

Different people, better opportunities.

When drinking becomes the focus, how are you supposed to trust the other people?

How are you supposed to trust a conversation that happened at one in the morning?

Your social circle is essentially other drinkers.

These are people you met at bars, at parties, or sent around alcohol, and you're trying to build a life on a foundation that's solid.

It's just tough.

And now when I look at today, I literally travel the world, rent yachts, hang out with people that are incredible.

We don't drink.

We work out in the morning.

We do deals faster.

We're always present.

Nobody's mind is turned off.

There's a whole group of people that realize today that health is wealth.

They would rather say no to people and not do some crazy thing and not have any FOMO and create the space for them to work on their dreams and goals than risk missing out meeting somebody at a party where everybody's wasted and nobody's having a productive conversation.

And quitting alcohol has allowed me to reset my peer group of people that are aligned with those values.

What I've discovered is those kind of people wake up early, they invest in themselves, and they think long term.

They essentially go from complaining about problems and situations to just solving them.

When you get rid of your vices and you have time to go out and wake up early and be around higher caliber people, those people will want to do deals with you.

It's crazy because I even see this trend now where coffee shops are hosting EDM dance parties at 11 a.m.

on Sunday morning.

People don't want to drink and party anymore.

They want to dance, they want to have fun, but why not do it where you're not sacrificing your sleep with people that are also aligned with the way you want to live life?

You know, my mother-in-law has this great quote that says, nothing good happens after 11 p.m.

That's true.

I go to bed at 9 p.m., but most people at 11 p.m.

just shut it down, go to sleep.

Like there's no need to stay up late.

Trust me, nothing magical that's going to change your life happens after 11 o'clock.

And think about your network.

You never know who you're going to meet as you go through life.

Imagine you're hungover and you're sitting on a plane.

You might even have paid for business class and you've got the hoodie on and the glasses on.

You don't want to talk to anybody.

That person sitting next to you could be a massive investor in your company, could be a potential business partner, could be one of your biggest customers.

Big moves come from big big conversations.

And if you're sitting there hung over and not having them, you don't create the opportunities that could be right in front of your face.

That's where I made most of my money through conversations with people in life because I was present to that opportunity.

This is a big one.

Think about all the burn relationships where you drank too much and you said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

And cutting alcohol allowed me to go and travel without ruining my day and having those big conversations.

Number four, a complete life system upgrade.

Quitting drinking helped me stay focused and focus builds wealth more than anything.

The biggest destroyer of wealth is distraction.

It's not just removing alcohol, it's rewiring how you approach everything.

If you finally make the decision to let go of something that had such a big part of your life, now you've started to build some confidence.

You started to build some new behaviors.

Essentially, you have an identity shift.

You go from maybe being a consumer of things to a creator of your life.

You go from like seeking temporary pleasure and like living in this numbed out state to building long-term value.

You start to be able to deal with massive problems.

And when you live a big life, you have big problems.

If you have a little problem that you can't deal with and you have to start drinking, guess what?

Little life.

You want big problems, like $10 million problems, you're going to have to create some space for it.

In many ways, delaying gratification with alcohol has trained me to delay gratification with investments and businesses.

My horizon for things are way longer.

I've got a 55-year business plan.

I didn't even think that way before.

That's why the whole system got upgraded because of that one decision.

And it made me a ton of money.

Before I was thinking for the weekend, now I'm thinking for the decade.

What's interesting is that same muscle that'll keep you sober is also the same one that'll keep you financially disciplined.

In many ways, success isn't about saying yes to more things.

It's saying no to almost everything.

It is a subtraction, not an addition problem.

When I think of like the ultimate ultimate productivity tool, it's having a not-to-do list.

And at the top of that list for me is the vices.

It's the thing that I know that's holding me back from living into my potential.

And alcohol for a long time was that for me.

When I look back at how I used to think about my life when I was drinking, I thought I was living a big life and being successful, but the potential that I was living into was muted by the drinking.

Then I realized once I quit that I started to build momentum.

I built momentum, I built confidence because confidence is keeping the commitments that I made to myself in private.

And over time, being consistent started to build that confidence and build that momentum to now I get to stay in momentum.

It's one of the most powerful forces of the universe.

If you find yourself in momentum because you're making good decisions, stay there.

Like I mentioned before, these four lessons didn't just make me sober.

They made me rich.

And the crazy part, it all started with one decision to put my family first.

Break the cycle.

I wanted to be the person in my lineage to stop it.

I grew up around alcoholism.

I knew better.

I shouldn't have drank.

And I did anyways.

If you want to build serious wealth, you need to be honest about what's holding you back.

I believe the world will show you where you're not free and you may know exactly what I'm talking about.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do isn't adding something new to your life.

It's subtracting something that's keeping you small.

The impact to my life, it's hard to measure.

It gave me the energy I needed to attack the day.

It gave me the mental clarity to make the right decisions.

It allowed me to get around people.

Like I'm speaking on stages like Tony Robbins, John Maxwell.

I've built this audience of almost 10 million followers on social media.

It's wild.

None of that would have happened, that ability to think about a bigger life.

None of that would have happened if I was still drinking.

I'd still be doing what I was doing before.

And I could see that line.

I had to give something up to create the space for something more.

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