7 Habits That Took Me From Broke to Millionaire

I'm going to share with you the seven habits of millionaires that most people learn way too late. These help me stop wasting life as a broke 24-year-old and become a cash millionaire at age 27.
If you start today, they'll literally compound into millions. So let's dive into the seven habits of millionaires.
Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million 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 habit number one, talk to strangers.
Everyone is one conversation away from achieving their dreams. You've probably heard this before, your network is your net worth.
But it's not just knowing people. See, a lot of folks make it a game of like, I know this person and I have this contact and I have this email.
But you don't know them. And honestly, they don't want to help you.
And that is the big thing. It's not who you know.
It's will they support you when you reach out to them. And the only way you can even start a relationship is learning to talk to strangers, learning how to go from cold, I've never met you, to warm, this person wants to help me in my life.
To do this right, you have to learn how to introduce yourself. It's the number one skill that I teach all young men that I coach.
So the format is this. You say, hi, my name is, then I help, then get desired outcome, then your unique process.
For me, when I was building SaaS Academy, I would say, hi, my name is Dan Martel. I help software CEOs get growth in their business with our perfect exit strategy.
Then the person can lean in and ask you, well, how does that work? You can practice this every day, all day long. When you go into a retail store, ask the person, how late do you guys stay open? It sounds so trivial, but learning to ask a complete stranger a question, getting those anxious feelings out of the way and just making it who you are, asking the waiter how long they've been working there or what they would order if it was their birthday.
Those are all great ways that on a daily basis, you can build this muscle and overcome the fear of talking to strangers. When I decided I wanted to go be on other people's podcasts, I sat down and I sent personalized messages to over 500 podcasts.
I knew my goal was to just get reps. It was less about being on the right podcast and more about getting time on a podcast.
And even though it sucked not getting replied to or getting no's, I learned a long time ago that if I want to win, I have to fight for the no's, not the yes's. And that's why I reached out to so many people so I could learn to talk to strangers, learn to answer the question.
What do you do? How did you get started? What is your story? Before you get the opportunity to have your Oprah moment, you have to be ready for it. The more hands you shake, the more money you make.
And if you're not

talking to strangers, then you're not learning anything new. They don't know about you.
You don't know what they know. You already know what you know.
Asking questions gets you new information to be able to grow your life. But you can't build your network if you don't make time for it.
Which brings us to habit number two, manage your energy flows. Most people confuse work with getting things done.
See, I used to work 100 hours a week. I was burnt out, stressed out, overworked, and I couldn't figure out how to get out of it.
Now, I work less than 40 hours a week, but I'm way more productive. The reason why is I focus on energy management, not time management.
One of my favorite quotes on this by Benjamin Franklin is that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. To make sure that I get the most out of every day, and I used to think I was productive.
I wasn't. I do these things.
First off is I make sure everything I do is blocked in my calendar. I'm talking personal, professional, workouts, date nights.
I need to see if I have capacity for more. I need to understand if there's conflicts where I don't have enough time to get a project done, what has to get dropped so that I can deliver on my commitments.
If I don't put it in the calendar, then I'm playing a game in my head and your brain was not designed to retain a lot of information. It was designed to solve problems.
So take the stuff that you want to get done out of your head and put it into your calendar. The other thing that took me a long time to learn is put the most important tasks first.
This is what all millionaires do. They wake up and they attack the money-making projects first thing in the morning because if they get those things done right, everything else takes care of itself.
It's the leading domino. Most people make the mistake of saying freedom is doing what I want with who I want anytime I want.
The truth is that if you don't write things down in your schedule and know what you're saying no to, then a yes is a no to your dreams. Because if you say yes to somebody to taking the day off and going to the beach, but you don't know what you're giving up, then essentially you might be saying no to your dreams, your goals of the future by saying yes to the present.
That is not what millionaires do. And if you want to make this even more powerful, review your calendar the night before.
8 p.m. every night, it's in my calendar.
I review the next day, even though it's pretty well baked a week ahead of time. I just want to ask myself, does this feel good? Does it flow right? Am I having the right conversation? Am I focusing on the right projects? If not, I make adjustments.
And this next one is on every millionaire's calendar. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube.
I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube.
Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you.
I've got a new episode so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode.

Which brings us to habit number three, feed your mind.

One of the greatest gifts my dad ever gave me

was when I got out of rehab at 17 years old

was a decision to give me an unlimited budget

for computer books.

He told me as long as I finished it,

he would pay for the next one.

And my dad didn't have unlimited means.

I knew how much of a stretch it was for him to be willing to say this to me. But he understood, and I eventually learned, the power of self-education, the value of reading a book, understanding how to solve problems on my own.
Since then, I've read over 1,800 books. What's crazy is a book can give you 20 years of knowledge in a few hours for just 20 bucks.
Any new goal that I set for myself, I always ask, what are the three to five books that the best in the world recommend around that topic? If it's fitness, if it's relationship, if it's business, and then I go deep. Not only do I read them, I study them.
I ensure that when I'm reading them, I'm thinking, how can I apply this today? And then also, how do I teach this to others? I read to learn, not to finish. The moment I get a massive takeaway from a book, I go execute.
And if I never come back to that book because it solved my problem, I have no problems not finishing a book. I honestly believe for myself and many of my friends that are millionaires, reading first thing in the morning primes our mind.
It gets us ready to find opportunities all around us. And the coolest part is when I read those 10 pages minimum every day, I'm looking for something that I can use to serve the world with.
And that energy of going on the hunt and highlighting different options to then share my Instagram, I think that's what makes the book work for me. If you want to go deeper and learn how I think about my calendar and buy back my time, then get my book.
I put 27 years of experience into this book and distilled it into the only strategies you need to read to get the most out of your life. But knowledge alone won't make you a millionaire.
Which brings us to habit number four, be obnoxiously curious. The other day, my kids started asking why.
And then I said, stop asking me why. And then the other one started asking why.
And then both of them just kept going, why, why, why? And it occurred to me, I don't want to stop them from being curious, but I think in this moment they were messing with me, that idea of asking why and being curious is a powerful way to challenge any situation. If you don't learn to ask questions, even if it makes other people feel uncomfortable, then you'll never understand the reasoning behind why something is being done for you to be able to use that in other areas of your life.
Albert Einstein famously said, I'm not talented. I'm just curious.
Years ago, I was hanging out with my mentor at a dinner party. I said to him, it was interesting watching you because you just sat back and listened to everybody's answer.
Yet I knew you already knew most of the stuff you were hearing. Why did you do that? And he said, I already know what I know.
Learning from other people is how I progress my life forward. I think some people just talk too much.
And that one hit me. As an extreme extrovert, I realized I wasn't asking enough questions.
So this is exactly how I use curiosity to become a millionaire. First off, I would ask my customers, the ones that bought and the ones that didn't buy, why didn't they buy? What was missing for them to say yes? The ones that bought, what did you believe to be true that made you think that this is the right product for you? I asked my team why.
I asked them, why did you decide to work here? Why are you deciding to do this? Why do they prioritize certain projects? How do they think about their work and where they want to end up in the future? Being curious about your customers and your team is how you develop a different mental model to be able to solve problems that are more effective. Even more importantly to that is asking yourself why.
Why do you react that way? Why do you feel anger when those situation happens? What gets you frustrated? I always say the world will show you where you're not free. A life unexamined is a life that wasn't lived.
For you to truly express yourself in business, with your family, with your friends, you have to understand who you are. Even today, I was just recently at one of my mentors, Patrick Bet David's office, and I saw a poster on the wall.
And I asked one of the sales guys, what's that poster? And he told me that it's all the goals of the business. And the way it works is that if the bottom people don't hit their goal, because there was a reward next to it, the people at the top don't get theirs.
And I thought to myself, how simple of an idea to get everybody aligned in the business with their goals across different departments. I took that idea.
I created the aligned goals ladder within my business. And now I've got my team operating towards a common goal because I got curious when I was visiting another office.
Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week.
Find it at martellmethod.com. Which brings us to habit number five, ask for feedback.
When my brother started his home building company, he almost went bankrupt. The reason why is he built a product that nobody wanted to buy.
How did he end up doing that? Because he didn't ask for feedback. He knew his target customer was first-time home buyers, specifically women, but he never asked them about his designs, the locations, the finish, the fit.
And he ended up building these houses that are said to have no curb appeal. Before he ran out of money, he called me up and we changed the whole strategy.
Instead, what we did is we identified five women that were his ideal customer, ran around to all the open houses that were going on by his competitors, collected all the feedback about what these women love, then fed that to the designer so he could architect the perfect home. He went from almost going bankrupt to building and selling 16 homes in his first year.
That's the power of feedback. Money runs out, feedback multiplies.
What's unique about my approach in business that allows me to make a million in my first year minimum is that I start expecting that something's wrong about my idea. I'm looking for how to validate my assumptions, not holding onto the belief that I'm right and then hoping the market responds.
No business plan survives first contact with a customer. In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about shooting bullets, lead bullets at the target so that you can refine your focus.
And only once you're hitting the target with multiple bullets, you then load up the cannon and take a shot because you know it's going to hit. The challenge with feedback is that you have to be careful who you listen to.
I used to make the mistake of just asking everybody for feedback. People that are not your target customer, even people that signed up for your product but never used it because you didn't check, are horrible people to ask feedback from.
I see this even when people hire and fire employees. When they're leaving the company after they fired them, they're asking them for feedback for what they could have changed.
Why would you change your business for somebody that you decided to fire that's no longer there? So yes, get feedback, but ensure you get it from the right people. But the next habit is one that millionaires can't live without.
Which brings us to habit number six, measure everything. A year ago, I decided I wanted to have visible abs.
Why? Well, I heard there was 22 million millionaires in the US, but there's only 3 million people with visible abs. So I thought it'd be a fun little project, 90 days.
What changed? Everything. Specifically though, I had to measure all aspects of my health.
I had to measure my macros. I had to measure my workouts.
I had to measure my weight. These are things that I recorded on a daily, sometimes twice a day basis so that I could ensure I could drop 33 pounds in 90 days and have absolutely shredded abs.
The best part is I've kept it up 12 months later. How? By continuing with the measurement.
One of my beliefs is what you measure with specificity and frequency expands. I get a daily cash email for all of my companies so I can understand how money moves in and out of my businesses on a daily basis.
And I use that as almost like a heartbeat for how my companies are doing. Yes, my CFO creates reports, but at the end of the day, something as simple as cash and wanting it to expand and focusing on it is I think one of my key strategies that I would never get rid of.
But even with all the tracking in the world, none of the millionaires I know would make it anywhere without this last habit. Before we get back to the episode, if you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go follow me on Instagram, Dan Martell,

2Ls and Martell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time.
I'd love to see you there. Have an amazing day.
Which brings us to habit number seven, default to action. I have people talk to me all the time about starting their next thing, starting their first thing, and they always put it off.
They wait until the situation is perfect. The truth is it's not about making the right decision.
It's about making any decision and then making it right. Here's how much I personally believe in taking action when you know it's on your heart.
In 2012, my company Flowtown was bought by Demandforce and I had to stick around for 12 months. It's called your earn out so that I received the full amount that they bought me for.
Yet after a few months of being there, I came up with a new idea, this concept called clarity. And I knew on my heart, I really wanted to do that.
But I also knew leaving was kind of a dumb financial decision. But I decided after seven weeks of working on that idea that I had to go do it.
After three months, I not only raised $1.6 million in funding, demand force got acquired by Intuit for $600 million, which meant that it triggered a clause in the contract that meant that I still got paid out my earn out. That's when I reinforced this belief I heard a long time ago, which is the world rewards those that take courageous decisions.
And your default to action is you making that courageous decision. Courage isn't making a decision when you have no fear.
Courage is making a decision in spite of fear. If I didn't decide to go work on this new project, I probably would have never got to that next level of growth and got the money not only from the exit, but from eventually exiting that second company.
I bet on myself and that's what I want you to do for yourself. You want to be patient with your results, but impatient with action.
You might be young thinking, I need to be further along. Or you might be further along in your life and say, why am I not further along? I'm telling you, just be impatient with daily action, be consistent, but also understand results sometimes take time.
You can't make a baby in one month with nine women. What millionaires do different is they don't just talk about doing the thing, they actually do the thing.
By the time you hear about it through their mouth, they've already taken action on it because they have a process for taking action. One of them I like to use is this concept called MINS, your most important next step.
If I can just distill where I feel blockage in my life to move forward into that next step, and then just commit to taking any action towards that one thing, not the bigger thing, that usually gets me building momentum and momentum is contagious. Money likes speed.
Your ability to process imperfect information and make a decision is what makes the best entrepreneurs millionaires. Thanks for listening to Martell Method.
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