7 High Income Skills of the Top 1%

I'm gonna share with you the only seven skills

to create unlimited wealth.

These skills are what the top 1% earners

use to attract wealth into their lives.

They're the same skills I use to go

from a broke 23-year-old to building a $100 million empire.

So, without further explaining it,

these are the only seven skills that will make you rich.

Welcome to the Martell 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.

Thank you. 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. The first skill is connecting.
Connecting with people as a skill, it's number one. Relationships are like the currency in the entrepreneurial world.
But if you don't know how to connect, it can be really tough. So here's a few things I want to teach you.
Number one is learn to remember people's names. I get it.
Some people say, well, I'm not good with names. Yet the most beautiful sound to another human being is the sound of their name.
It is for you. So learn it and remember it.
Number two, be curious. A lot of people worry about meeting new people because they don't know what to say.
The truth is, is just ask better questions. I like to ask like how and what questions.
And what's cool about that is those two questions will get the person to tell you stories, which allows you to sit back and listen and take the pressure off having to say something smart because you're curious. Just be the person that asks the other person the question so they'll tell you they'll fall in love with you.
They won't even know why, but they're gonna walk away going, man, I really like that guy. Number three is follow-up.
A lot of people say this in sales. They go, look, fortunes are made in the follow-up, but it's just true.
If you get connected to somebody and you think they're somebody that's doing cool things or you can be helpful, just make a point to follow up. Touch base, check in with them, invite them to another dinner, see if you can be helpful.
Like some of the best, most connected people I know are the ones that just send a text message. Hey man, I was just meeting with this guy.
You mentioned your name. Hope all is good.
Easy, simple, and allows you to stay top of mind on their mind. Number four, get in bigger rooms.
If you're the smartest person amongst your peer group, get a new peer group. If you're the richest person on your street, move.
If you're the most successful person amongst your entrepreneurial community, go find a new community. I know it sounds trite to say, but you'll only grow to the level of expansion that's possible in the container you're in.
So if you're the big dog in your room, then you got to go find another room where you're the little dog. I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, I got invited by a guy named David Sachs to this brunch.
The Canadian embassy was doing this thing. And I walked up the sidewalk and I get there and I see the valet at this guy's home, AKA mansion, parking cars.
And we're talking like Lexuses and Mercedes and R8s. And I was so scared to go in, but I went anyways.
That set the tone for the rest of my experience in Silicon Valley and I almost didn't go because I was scared to be the little guy in the big room. Number five, no room, you make one.
A lot of people think, well, I don't know anybody. Go create an event.
Go create the place where the people you want to meet would want to come. Well, how do you do that? Go find one person that they all want to learn from, connect with that one, invite them, host an event, a lunch and learn, whatever it is.
And then they'll all come in. You're the connector.
And then you get to meet everybody. I remember my buddy, Marcel asked me the same question.
He's like, man, I really want to do an event and how should I do it? And I said, it's very simple. Find the number one speaker that you think everybody's going to listen to and then sell tickets.
And that's what he did. That one event, it's called Master Mindset, changed his whole life.
I was one of the speakers. It was an awesome event.
He didn't know anybody. I think he was like 23 at the time working for Apple in the retail store.
And he became one of the most connected people in the city because he decided to make his own room, which leads us to skill number two, which is being lazy. I know you're shocked.
What are you talking about? I thought we were here to do hard work. Nope.
I'm actually going to encourage you to consider trying to be as lazy as possible. My philosophy has always been if I can have something done for me by somebody else, especially if I'm going to do it over and over and over again, then it makes sense for me just not to ever do it.
I just want to make the decision once and then never repeat myself. In software, we call it dry.
Do not repeat yourself. I've taken this thing to the extreme, but even back in the day, like in 2008, I had a full-time CTO working for me.
His name was Scott and he built apps for me, tools to automate my processes, ways for me to analyze my investments or to manage my networking activities or find new opportunities to invest in. Everything that I did once that I knew I was going to do dozens of times, I said, hey, Scott, could you build some code for this? And pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, done.
Being lazy is actually the right move. See, broke people get good at doing tasks.
Rich people get good at avoiding them. So here are six ways to be lazy.
Number one, I call it the fixed frustrations. Oftentimes, people just think to themselves, like, it's not a big deal.
I'll just do it. I got to clean up my house.
I got to go grab a cable. I got to go run some errands.
I encourage you to go to your house. And as you walk around your house, make a list of things that frustrate you, where the soap is in the bathroom to where stuff is stored or the way your laptop does, whatever, anything that just, even if it's a micro frustration, I want you to write it down.
That's step one. If you do that, that at least give you the lens to see the opportunities to actually get more done.
Number two is you got to create stencils. Let's say I was remodeling my house and I wanted to put birds on a wall.
There's two ways to do this. I can either hire an artist with a paintbrush and they can go and they could paint each individual bird.
And that would probably take all day for them to fill up a whole wall. Or I could get a stencil made and with the spray can, I could literally put the stencil on the wall and I could spray it.
That's the idea of building a system. So for example, in my home, we have a house manager, Betty, and there's this one spot in our pantry that anything that gets placed in that spot, it magically gets reordered.
If I'm upstairs and I finished all my toothpaste and there's no more in the drawer, I just put it downstairs and that tells her to reorder. That is a stencil.
That is a system. We do it once and we never have to do it again.
Number three, delegate everything. If somebody else can do it at a quarter of what you make per hour, it is 100% logical to have somebody else do it for you because you should take that hour back and reinvest it in yourself.
So I think of putting gas in my car, running errands, wash and fold. It pretty much all of the personal and professional tasks that somebody else, you could actually like create employment and have them support you so that you're not always the bottleneck for getting stuff done.
Just the emotional side of that, of not having things on your mind that like weighs you down is worth delegating to somebody else. Number four is set up sensors.
If you delegate and somebody else is doing something for you, then you're worried, well, what if it goes wrong? And then you start freaking out. Well, a sensor is the idea of getting a report.
Okay. Think about like a water sensor in a basement to sense if there's a flood, it turns the water off.
No matter where I have somebody in my business doing something for me, I ask them to give me a report. Oftentimes it's a survey or a feedback loop from the customer that answers a question asking how happy they are.
So I know that I don't have some department going rogue and a bad manager not doing the right steps with a bunch of upset customers. Number five, stay simple.
See, lazy equals elegant solutions to complex problems. When I think of things around in my life, like I have a Yeti coffee container and the latch on the top is magnetic.
Why is that an elegant solution? Because it has no parts. It's easy to clean.
And I just love those kinds of examples. Now, was it the cheapest way to solve that problem? Probably not.
But the whole idea is to keep it simple. Number six, prioritize by saying no.
A no is a yes to your goals and a yes is a no to your dreams. See, most people don't know what they want.
So they just say yes to something's going to work out but if you actually know what you want to create then you have to say no to people to create the space to actually go and do the work to get that thing so do less say no and prioritize but you can't just wait for opportunities to come out of nowhere 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 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. We got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything.
Now let's get back to the episode. Which brings us to skill number three, creating.
When I first started content creating, I was crazy awkward on camera. I would go in the studio with my buddy Jared and we'd just sit there for months trying to shoot.
And eventually I did the work to become somebody that could shoot videos in one take. I didn't want to have to do multiple take, multiple takes.
So people see me today and they go, wow, Dan, you've gotten so good on camera. They don't realize that it's 10 years in the making.
And it's kind of crazy now because I put out so much content to the world just showing myself. I mean, one crazy fact that most people don't know is this video, I don't see it until you see it.
I don't tell my team what to edit, how to edit, what to put out to the world. All the content I create from my reels to my shorts to my YouTubes, because of that, my world is exposed and people get to know me.
And it's crazy because the other day I was getting my haircut and the the guy sitting next to me, he looks over and he goes, Dan Martel? I was like, hey man. And it was really fun because we got a conversation going about all the things he knew I was into and all the things he was doing that he thought I was interested in, which made it super fun for me.
It's not who you know anymore. It's who knows you.
You trying to build a network of a bunch of people that can help you, that's cool. But becoming a person so valuable to the world that they want to go out of their way to get to know you and to help you, that's next level.
That's why creating content is one of the highest income skills you could learn. So here's the deal.
Start creating right now. Don't wait.
The best time to start, 10 years ago. The second best time, today.
I want to share a few principles with you. Number one, first hand up.
Anytime somebody gives you the opportunity to speak, I want you to put your hand up. I'm talking at a wedding event at work where somebody needs an MC.
Always put your hand up because it's going to put you in a position to learn to communicate and start creating the ideas that you have. Number two, talk to your camera.
I'll tell you, one of the funnest things that I do for my coaching clients is ask them to talk to their camera. And the reason why, when they start doing this, it makes them confront who they are.
I'm literally sitting here talking to my camera and all of a sudden I look and I go, oh, I don't like the way this is set up or my hair's like this. Oh, I don't sound too smart.
And geez, man, I can't believe I didn't shave my ears. No, I'm just kidding.
But that's the kind of stuff that comes up when you start talking to your camera, which will actually do so much work on you. Here's my homework for you.
Go shoot a 15 second video, teaching anything, sharing stuff, either inspiration, education, or entertaining, and then post it on your Facebook stories, your Instagram stories, anywhere. Just go post it.
It's one of the best ways to develop that high income skill. Number three, coach and teach weekly.
If you wanna get really good at creating content, then start training your team. Start coaching the people around you.
It could be Little League, maybe you're coaching your kid's class, or it could be running a training session with your team every week. I do it every week.
I call it leadership training. And it's my favorite part because I know as I pour into people, I'm learning how to communicate better.
I'm recording it so it creates content and they're getting the benefit of understanding these ideas I might've learned that week and I'm reinforcing it by teaching it to them. Everything you want is on the other side of reach and reputation.
Who knows you, how big that audience is, and what do they think about you, your reputation. And if you've got a good reputation because you created a lot of value and you have a big reach, your vision board, your dreams, your goals, they sit on the other side of that.
People don't buy the best product. They buy the best story.
If you craft your creation and how you put out content, then it'll tell a story about who you are to people and they'll want to buy from you just because they feel like they know, like, and trust you. Making content will teach you more about yourself than anything else you could possibly do.
If you want me to coach you through how I create over 196 unique pieces of content per week and get access to my five daily non-negotiables that ask all my clients to follow to grow their business, then just find me on Instagram and message me the words YouTube content on IG and I'll send you a free resource. Which brings us to the fourth high income skill, which is selling.
When I started off, I used to spend 16 hours a day writing code. I was in my happy place, behind my computer, not talking to anybody.
I was a little more introverted. And then when I finally built something I needed people to buy, it turned out I'm not very good at selling.
At the time, I wasn't. So I went on a journey.
I decided to start with audiobooks and I would just drive around listening to Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar and Jeffrey Gittimer and all these like sales luminaries. Now, it's all I do.
Learning to persuade, communicate, convince somebody to see the world the way I see it, the highest value skill I have. It's the thing that's made me the most money.
I've raised over 600 million from other investors. The only way I was able to do that is learning this skill of selling.
Nothing happens in business until someone sells something. Selling is one of those skills that affects all different aspects of your life.
You want to get a raise? Learn to sell. You want to get motivated? Learn to sell yourself.
You want to attract talent? You got to sell the business. You want to get investors? Sell the vision.
Girlfriend? Sell the opportunity, man. You got to step up and be the best version of yourself.
A lot of people are actually incredible. They just don't know how to tell somebody or present the information where the person sees it the way they see it.
Your income is directly related to your ability to sell. The crazy part is your ability to sell will generate profits and profits solve all problems.
A lot of people don't like to sell because they think it's sleazy.

My definition of sales is very simple,

getting people to change.

Change their perspective on the world,

change their perspective on a buying decision,

change their perspective on their priorities.

If I can get them to change their mind on the thing,

then I get them to buy, that's called sales.

The way you get awesome at sales is learning how to ask powerful questions.

The best salespeople talk the least.

Questions that gets the buyer in a position

that they wanna buy.

And if you manage to sell people on the idea,

you'll keep them going with skill number five.

Before we get back to the episode,

if you actually wanna 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, 2LsandMartell 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 skill number five, which is leading. When I was in my 20s, I had a business, and I used to assume like, hey, I hired you to do the work, do it.
And I get mad because people that worked for me didn't do the thing the way I expected. even though they like had on their resume that they had the skill.
Most time I'd fire them or they'd quit. And it occurred to me at some point that maybe the problem is me.
I mean, even with my family, I'm talking my brothers and my sisters, not my two boys and my wife. My job is to learn how to lead myself so that I can be the leader they need so I can be the example.
It sounds crazy, but once I changed that frame and became 100% accountable for leading everybody in my life, it just made life easier. There's this incredible quote one of my mentors and friends, John Maxwell, says all the time, which is, leaders know the way, show the way, and go the way.
If you don't know what's around the corner, if you're not showing people how to get there, if you don't have clarity of what that looks like, nobody's going to follow. Here's a few things that I think will really help you.
If you don't have any followers, it actually means you're not a good leader yet. So just understand if nobody's following you, nobody's beating your door down to work with you on your project, you just gotta get better at leading.
Number two is everyone has an opportunity to lead. It could be you putting your hand up for a project at work.
It could be volunteering for something, joining a nonprofit board. There's opportunities to lead.
It could be as simple as picking up the garbage on your street and then encouraging other people to do the same. Leading is about influence.
Leading is about being the example. Leading is about trying to get other people enrolled in your vision.
And those opportunities are all around us. You don't want to be a transactional leader, which is tell people what to do, check that they got done and tell them what to do next.
That will keep you a prisoner to your business. What I encourage you is to do transformational leadership, which is all about setting a clear outcome for what needs to get done, then giving them the measurement that you're going to use to measure their progress, and then use a coaching framework to be able to sit down with them when they fall short to actually help them up, not be critical.
Most people spend more time criticizing their team than training their team. My philosophy is that if you're clear on the outcome and you practice that skill, you measure properly, and then you coach them up to be more, you're gonna have incredible followers on your team and you're actually gonna be leading the right way.
But at some point, you'll hit a wall. And that's why skill six is grit.
I'm actually quite ashamed to tell you this, but when I was 26, 27, I started angel investing. And my first couple of years, I lost almost all of it.
Almost $3 million. My first couple of years of investing, thinking that I get involved and I have the magic touch, things will just magically turn into more money.
It almost got me to a point where I decided maybe I should stop investing and just get back to keep building the businesses because I know how to do that. But I didn't.
I had grit. I had determination.
I had resilience. This is a quote that I use to keep pushing me forward anytime I'm dealing with challenges is that it's impossible to lose if you don't quit.
I don't know when I'm going to win. I just do the work.
That process that I've fallen in love with will eventually get me to the outcome I want. Business isn't a game of skill.
It's a game of will. Do you have the will to stay playing the game? See, a lot of people think it's a binary outcome.
I played the game, I lost, all of a sudden I'm a loser. No, you just learned.
You didn't lose. You just lose if you stop playing the game, which sounds trite and you hear people talk about all the time.
But trust me, having been doing this for 27 years, today I look like I'm winning. I've been working at this, learning how to go from loss to loss to loss with excitement and figure out what's the opportunity that I take and then apply it to the next thing.
My overnight success took years. Many of you guys are new to my content in the last year, 12 months, 14 months max.
I've been doing this for 10 years. Having grit to some people sounds like it's gonna be painful.
Pain is not optional. Everybody will go through pain.
Suffering is. And the way you overcome suffering is having a purpose for the pain.
Then the hard doesn't feel painful because it's just part of the process. Before we get back to the episode, if you wanna 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.
And the last skill is this, vision. The number one thing that I learned when I moved to San Francisco at 28 years old, any idea less than a billion dollar opportunity wasn't worth pursuing.
And I know that sounds crazy because some of you guys are like, I just want to do a million. The person who wakes up every day and has a goal over the next 10 years to hit a million dollars.
And the other person that wakes up every day and has a goal over the next 10 years to hit $10 million, the only difference between those two people is not effort. They're both going to work.
They're both going to get up. It's the decision of what you're going to create is having the clarity of vision.
You'll just make different decisions along the way. And being exposed to a bunch of 22 year olds building the future and technology and innovation and literally not talking to you unless you were talking billion dollar outcomes fascinated me at first, actually scared me for a long time.
I was like, maybe I'm not cut out for this. But I said, you know what? If that guy can do it, why can't I? I remember I was at a party and a guy that just raised on $100 million valuations running around this party, trying to find somebody to give him a pipe to smoke some.
And I'm like, I don't even do drugs. I should be able to compete against this person.
I should at least be at that level. I got this philosophy from Steve Jobs.
He said, everything you see around you was first imagined in someone's mind. That building, this city, it was all built from somebody from the past, no different than you.
All they had was the vision to create it and they took steps towards it. So here's a few ideas that'll help you really make this actionable.
Number one, write it down and get specific. If you don't put pen to paper and verbalize and document what you want to see created and get specific in regards to the amount of money and how it looks and all the details, then you won't have the target.
And if you don't have a target, it's impossible for you to hit it. Number two is you got to look at it daily.
I actually have my goals on a document that I review three to four times a day. It's part of my five daily non-negotiables.
And I even have salespeople on my team that laminated their goals on their desk. I love it so much.
Every time I have friends visiting, I always go and grab them and say like, Hey, look at this. This is this 22 year old five-year vision for his life specific.
Boom, boom, boom, boom. He looks at it all day long.
Do you think

he's going to hit it? Yes. You keep it in your reality.
You keep it right there. It's impossible

for you not to see it. And number three is you got to speak it to others.
I believe words to

your goals is the activation of your dreams. Most people have big dreams for their life to really

make it activate, to hold yourself accountable, to start helping the world co-create with you. You got speak it, you gotta tell them, you have to put it all over the place.
Gary V, what does he wanna buy? New York Jets. Why does like 10 million people in the world know what one guy wants to buy? It's not even his core business.
It's because he spoke it over and over and over. I mean, pretty much as long as I've known him 17, 18 years, he's said it every time he's had the opportunity because it allows him to let everybody else know what he's going for.
And it makes everybody understand what it's about. What I've discovered, unfortunately, is most people never allow themselves to dream because they immediately go to some aspect of, am I that person? Do I deserve it? Am I worthy of that accolade? I mean, I literally coach people all the time.
I'm so scared that they find out that they're not who they think they are. And the crazy part is that is why you won't hit the vision.
Not because you can't, because you don't have clarity around it, because you don't believe that you're worth it. And I want you to know the fact that you're watching this right now and you have a heartbeat and you have a soul and you're a human means you're special.
And I mean that. you are special.
You're here. You're watching this.
We're doing this. There's no other justification needed.
There's no proof required. The fact that you're here watching this, wanting to make your life better means that you're able to.
It's kind of awesome if you think about all the things that had to happen for you to be here in this moment, to hear this message perfectly. I don't believe in accidents.
Thanks for listening to the Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do

me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people

get unstuck, reclaim their freedom and build their empire.