Summary in 100 words or less
The key to growth isn’t working harder—it’s buying back your time. Move up the Replacement Ladder—start by delegating admin tasks, then delivery, marketing, sales, and finally leadership—so you can focus on what truly matters. Hire to buy time, not to grow. Build playbooks so your team can operate without you. Design a Perfect Week and Preloaded Year to protect your energy and eliminate chaos. Lead by outcomes, not instructions. Coach, don’t command. Passion fuels everything—your energy infects your team, customers, and results. Stop playing small. Build a game you’d want to play forever.
→ Join weekly newsletter to receive timeless insights every Monday
Commentary
My Highlights
The only way to grow your business past a certain point is to buy back your time and redeposit it where it matters most.
The little-known secret to reaching the next stage of your business is spending your time on only the tasks that: (a) you excel at, (b) you truly enjoy, and (c) add the highest value (usually in the form of revenue) to your business.
The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
Under pain, many entrepreneurs will make subconscious decision to sabotage their own company because growing means more pain.
Time is the currency, the vehicle allowing you to purchase what you love or what you hate. If you purchase more work that you can’t stand, well, you’ll build a business of pain. If instead you constantly think of trading additional money to buy back your time, you’ll grow a company that you’ll love, not one that you’ll want to escape from.
Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love, and only what they love.
While some entrepreneurs think, "One day, I can stop this madness if I work hard enough," smart entrepreneurs think, "Today, I’ll build a game I want to play forever."
Rule of thumb is that no one—not a founder, not an administrative assistant, not a baseball player, not a barista—should be performing a work task that they could outsource for one-fourth (i.e., 25 percent) of their current effective hourly rate.
Startups are inherently chaos. As a founder, you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty—and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then—you will run out of money and your company will die.
Even if you own your own business, if you’re trading your time for more money, you’re an employee: you just happen to be an employee of your own company.
Here are the rungs of the Replacement Ladder, in order:
- Administration
- Delivery
- Marketing
- Sales
- Leadership
If you want to see your business explode, if you want to truly apply the Buyback Principle, hiring an assistant is nonnegotiable. It’s the first hire every entrepreneur should make. Every hour you spend on admin tasks, answering emails, managing your calendar, calling the gardener, paying bills, et cetera is an hour robbed from your business, family, and dream life.
Administrative assistants, at the minimum, should provide two support functions, as I outlined in the Replacement Ladder. First, they should systematically manage your calendar. Second, they should independently manage your inbox.
A Playbook is exactly what it sounds like: it tells everyone on your team how to execute a play. From how to run sales to how to open a new location overseas, Playbooks offer a way to transport knowledge based on what’s already been tested and verified. “Do x, and y will happen.” When applied to the company as a whole, Playbooks unlock scale.
A Perfect Week does a few things:
- Eliminates buffer time
- Optimizes for energy
- Eliminates bleed time
- Allows you to spot N.E.T. time
No Extra Time—meaning, you can double up on certain tasks and “use time spent commuting, running errands, exercising or cleaning the house to feed your mind.” So while you’re commuting or vacuuming, you can be listening to a podcast. While you’re on an airplane, you can be reading. These moments allow you to grow personally and professionally while costing you no extra time.
When you design your week ahead of time, and account for all your time, you’ll understand exactly what you must say “no” to in order to say “yes!” to something that comes up sporadically.
Having your week planned doesn’t mean you don’t make changes—it just means you know what you’re changing when things come up (and they will).
Knowing a candidate’s personality to understand how they do their best work and how they work best with others is a key indicator of how successful they may be in your company.
Your company has a lot to offer: promotional opportunities, a paycheck, friends, community, personal growth, professional growth, network enhancement, résumé building, and a lifelong career. If you want to sell the future, you need to find out what your top candidate wants, then ensure you’re aligned in that endeavor.
Stop leading by telling someone how to do something and instead tell them what needs to get done. You set the outcomes, and you put the onus of responsibility on them.
Success didn’t come from the players alone—the coach was key. If you want to have a high-performance team, learn how to coach successfully.
Ensure that feedback is flowing freely. A lack of two-way communication and feedback can become a culture cancer and spread throughout the entire organization, causing major issues.
You’re going to face problems—I guarantee it. I can’t promise that you’ll dive into your next venture and succeed, but I can promise you that if your dream is not big enough, you won’t have a reason to try very hard. Entrepreneurism simply isn’t worth the effort unless you’re going for the gold.
When you’re energized by passion, the way you talk about your goals and the future has a different energy, and there’s nothing more contagious than energetic people: Customers buy more, employees work harder, vendors go above and beyond. Go find your passion, then pass it on.
At first, everything is fun to start, and many of us feel excited to finish well, once the end is in sight. But in the middle of pursuing our goals, we often lose sight of why we started down a path.
To accomplish your dream, who will be in the room with you? Who will you need to join your team to execute on your crazy idea? Will you need a board of directors? If so, how many people? Who’s on it?
A Preloaded Year is exactly what it sounds like—a proactive approach to your year. Similar to the Perfect Week, using a Preloaded Year means you’re acting proactively, choosing how you want to spend your time instead of reacting to the demands of others.
When we don’t pay someone else to do something we could afford to pay them to do, we’re robbing them of a paycheck.
“Playing small” doesn’t serve you, your loved ones, or any of your relationships. It teaches others to play small. By playing small, you become something less than you might otherwise be. By playing small, you deprive the world of your genius. Instead, be who you can be.
