Dan Martell - June 06, 2025


This Rule Made Me So Rich I Questioned The Meaning of Life

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Bill Gates Elon Musk Zuckerberg Optimus
This is how to build a business with ChatGPT Schools teach the wrong things

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

217.6

Word count

2,308

Sentence count

126

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

People that win in life, the 5% spend the time trying to figure out where the freaking hole is and try to plug it. The 95-5 rule is like the 80-20 rule, but on steroids. It essentially eliminates the illusion of productivity by saying, "What's the one thing that if you knock out of the park, like a massive domino, will knock all the things down and get things moving?" If you're truly growing, 95% of your calendar is gonna look completely different in a year. That's how you know you're making progress.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 20 years ago, I came across a rule, a rule that completely changed my life and work forever.
00:00:05.540 It's called the 95-5 rule. I first learned this rule rubbing shoulders with some of the
00:00:10.120 most successful billionaires that you probably know. And I've personally used this rule to go
00:00:15.040 from burning out, working 100 hours a week and ruining all my relationships, to building my
00:00:20.160 dream life, a beautiful family, having access to resources like the plane and the cars,
00:00:24.780 and mentoring hundreds of kids in my local community. So with that being said,
00:00:28.800 this is the 95-5 rule. The 95-5 rule means 95% of your results come from only 5% of your efforts.
00:00:37.600 Think of it like your life is like a boat on the ocean and you're going along and you accidentally
00:00:41.620 hit a rock and now all of a sudden you got water that's filling up the boat. Most people would run
00:00:45.560 to the bucket and just start trying to bail it out. People that win in life, the 5% spend the 0.96
00:00:51.060 time trying to figure out where the freaking hole is and try to plug it. Years ago, I hired a marketer
00:00:55.840 to come into a business that was doing about 3 million a year and they were super talented and
00:01:00.080 had all the right things to say. And everybody was super excited about them hitting the ground
00:01:04.280 running. And then six months later, we had to fire them. Why? Because instead of to stop and
00:01:09.260 doing the deep analysis and figuring out what was actually wrong, they just started getting busy
00:01:15.000 doing things. They didn't have the discipline to do the audit, to figure out where the problems were
00:01:20.020 and then the discipline to focus on what to say no to so that they could actually move the needle.
00:01:25.840 The 95-5 rule is like the 80-20 rule, 0.75
00:01:28.940 the Pareto principle, but on steroids.
00:01:31.080 It essentially eliminates the illusion of productivity
00:01:34.120 by saying, what's the one thing
00:01:36.340 that if you knock out of the park,
00:01:38.140 like a massive domino will just knock all the things down
00:01:41.280 and get things moving.
00:01:42.220 If you're truly growing, 95% of your calendar
00:01:45.500 is gonna look completely different in a year.
00:01:48.680 That's how you know you're making progress.
00:01:50.780 If you're still doing this year,
00:01:51.940 the same stuff you did last year,
00:01:53.160 probably missing the mark.
00:01:54.920 Which brings us to the question, how do you find your 5%?
00:01:58.900 You need to have a direction.
00:02:00.820 How can I focus on the right 5% if I don't know where I'm going?
00:02:03.560 Like if I don't know what the target looks like, how am I supposed to hit the target?
00:02:07.560 And people ask me, well, how do you prioritize?
00:02:09.240 How do you figure out the 5%? 0.98
00:02:10.560 How do you really focus?
00:02:11.780 Well, if I know where I'm going, then I can ask myself, does this decision get me closer
00:02:16.820 to that target?
00:02:18.360 Without clarity of vision, it can feel overwhelming.
00:02:21.900 It can feel hard.
00:02:22.840 A lot of people get depressed because they don't have clarity.
00:02:25.740 A confused mind can't move forward.
00:02:28.080 If I don't know what I'm trying to do, how am I supposed to make the right decision?
00:02:31.180 Bill Gates knew early his vision.
00:02:33.300 I want a personal computer in every home.
00:02:35.920 Zuckerberg, he literally said from the beginning, I want to build a metaverse.
00:02:39.400 Elon Musk, the whole world, if you follow him for like five seconds,
00:02:42.920 knows his number one priority in life is colonizing Mars.
00:02:46.540 And that's why he started every one of his companies.
00:02:49.000 Think about that.
00:02:49.540 Most people don't realize Starlink, Boring Company,
00:02:53.180 the AI, Optimus, the robots, Tesla, self-driving cars,
00:02:56.560 the whole infrastructure for colonizing Mars
00:02:59.720 is every one of his businesses.
00:03:02.460 Isn't that crazy?
00:03:03.320 That's the 5%. 0.92
00:03:04.480 Even Doge was him going,
00:03:06.560 if I don't help save our economy,
00:03:08.500 all the businesses I've created within that economy
00:03:10.920 could be at risk.
00:03:12.200 I'll go spend 90 days helping solve that problem
00:03:14.860 so then I can go and get back to building electric cars.
00:03:17.740 So think about it this way.
00:03:18.680 The clarity of your vision, what you see, determines the quality of your decisions.
00:03:24.120 If you're clear, your decisions are awesome.
00:03:26.860 So here's what you want to do.
00:03:28.200 Number one, dream big.
00:03:29.940 People ask me all the time, if you can go back and talk to that 20-year-old version
00:03:32.700 yourself, what would you whisper in their ear?
00:03:34.680 Dream bigger.
00:03:35.380 See, most people don't give themselves permission to dream, so then their target is so nearsighted,
00:03:40.900 it doesn't feel like it's big enough to make big decisions to move your life forward.
00:03:44.940 You actually have to go way out there, dream bigger, and then aim for it.
00:03:49.880 Then what you do, once you have that, sit down and write 12 goals for the year.
00:03:53.600 Write down 12 projects, outcomes, things you want to do with your life that if you accomplish,
00:03:58.680 even if you accomplish seven or eight of them, you know you're making progress.
00:04:02.540 Now, here's the kicker.
00:04:03.520 The next step is actually to circle the one that if you got done,
00:04:07.340 every other goal would feel obsolete or not needed or be a lot easier to attack.
00:04:11.760 Then I want you to write a list of projects that you got to get done to make that one goal accomplish and aggressively ignore the rest
00:04:20.680 That is how you execute the 95-5 rule, which brings us to the question
00:04:24.900 How do you make sure you're doing the five percent?
00:04:27.740 So today I woke up and my calendar is full of only the things that I not only love doing
00:04:32.820 But they give me the most leverage on my time, which i'll share with you in a second
00:04:36.660 My dad had this like really original quote used to say which was if you love the work you do
00:04:41.040 you'll never work a day in your life.
00:04:42.660 So that's why I designed the drip matrix for myself
00:04:44.720 and to teach my friends.
00:04:45.720 So the way it works is you evaluate all the things
00:04:48.280 you could do through an X and Y axis.
00:04:50.680 On one side, it's the things that light you up,
00:04:52.980 that give you energy, that pump you up,
00:04:54.820 that you look forward to do, right?
00:04:56.540 It might be creating with friends, it might be research,
00:04:59.120 it might be writing, whatever lights you up
00:05:01.120 gives you energy.
00:05:02.340 And the second makes you the most money.
00:05:04.740 It has to make you money.
00:05:06.120 Why? Because money is a resource.
00:05:07.860 Money is energy.
00:05:08.620 Money is a battery of storing value
00:05:11.340 you could use in other things.
00:05:12.580 Here's what's cool, is your 5% is in the very top
00:05:16.580 right corner of the drip matrix in the production quadrant.
00:05:20.420 It's in the quadrant of the quadrant that you focus on.
00:05:23.540 And for what it's worth,
00:05:24.420 this may need to change as your life changes.
00:05:26.280 Before I had kids, my life looked completely different.
00:05:28.880 I used to be all about staying up late
00:05:30.800 and getting a bunch of creative work done.
00:05:32.800 Now, my days are early.
00:05:34.220 Why?
00:05:34.580 I have human alarm clocks.
00:05:35.900 I have little kids.
00:05:36.700 I have to change and shift things.
00:05:38.160 There was times when certain meetings were green
00:05:40.880 and I loved doing them.
00:05:42.280 And then I realized I don't wanna do this anymore.
00:05:44.600 I don't enjoy it.
00:05:45.640 I don't even need to be here.
00:05:47.400 There's no net new value of me being here.
00:05:49.900 And guess what?
00:05:50.740 I'm not empowering my team to step up
00:05:53.100 when I stay in those things that used to be green.
00:05:55.500 Now they're yellow, sometimes red.
00:05:57.460 So I have to learn to let go and really self-evaluate
00:06:01.120 where am I focusing my time.
00:06:02.780 As an example, one of my friends owns a dental clinic
00:06:05.000 and he called me the other day
00:06:06.080 because he was like, hey, man, I need to restructure my life.
00:06:08.380 I got to understand this drip matrix.
00:06:09.940 And I asked him what was going on.
00:06:11.540 And he explained to me the biggest challenge, his bottleneck,
00:06:14.340 was he doesn't have enough staff.
00:06:16.020 That's your 5%.
00:06:17.220 Building a system for attracting, hiring, training, retaining top staff
00:06:23.620 is going to produce the biggest outcomes in your life.
00:06:26.620 Everything else is just things that have to get done,
00:06:28.880 but it's not going to move the needle.
00:06:30.500 Focus there.
00:06:31.440 And the way I keep the main thing, the main thing,
00:06:34.020 is I put that in my calendar first in the morning.
00:06:37.600 The first 90 minutes of every day
00:06:39.080 is working on the project
00:06:40.500 that's gonna push everything else forward,
00:06:42.600 keeping it there till it's solved,
00:06:44.320 not getting bored with it, not getting distracted,
00:06:46.560 being disciplined, stay with the problem.
00:06:49.920 See, I had this bad habit a long time ago
00:06:51.380 that I used to get bored with problems.
00:06:52.980 I moved on from them too quick and they were never solved.
00:06:55.460 The more I understood the 95.5 rule,
00:06:57.380 I realized that 5%, I gotta stay with it. 0.92
00:07:00.120 I gotta do less.
00:07:00.960 I shouldn't start another company.
00:07:02.240 I shouldn't invest in another company.
00:07:03.200 and I shouldn't distract myself, stay with it.
00:07:05.680 Which brings us to the last question
00:07:06.980 you're probably asking yourself,
00:07:08.240 what do I do with the other 95% of my time?
00:07:10.600 The best analogy I could give you
00:07:12.040 is to think of yourself like a chef, right?
00:07:14.760 In a kitchen, the chef should only be doing the thing
00:07:17.700 that actually makes the meal world-class.
00:07:20.600 He's not sitting there and doing all the prep.
00:07:22.540 He's not cutting all the vegetables.
00:07:23.840 He's not pre-cooking some of the proteins.
00:07:25.760 He literally sits there, the top chef, in a kitchen,
00:07:28.640 and things are brought to him.
00:07:30.140 He's done his work.
00:07:31.100 It's called mise en place.
00:07:32.260 he sits there and he does the work and the plates go out the kitchen perfect you want to figure out
00:07:38.260 how to get your life to the same place where you stay in that flow you stay in that zone and have
00:07:43.140 people support you around you even part-time even friends so you can keep creating and pushing your
00:07:48.180 life forward so that's what you do the other 95 think of the three d's number one is defer some
00:07:54.980 stuff that you want to do is just not a now thing understanding the right time for the right action
00:08:00.180 is just as important as understanding what to do.
00:08:02.440 Because if you do something too soon, it's not valuable.
00:08:04.640 So postpone intentionally, not passively.
00:08:07.480 You're allowed to defer things to next quarter, next year.
00:08:10.300 Just make the decision.
00:08:11.300 The second thing is delete it.
00:08:12.680 I can't tell you how often I go through,
00:08:14.500 I call it a pruning process,
00:08:15.900 where I just like look at stuff that I'm currently doing
00:08:18.320 and go, I'm just gonna remove that.
00:08:19.520 I'm gonna remove that.
00:08:20.260 I'm gonna remove that.
00:08:20.820 I did that for my morning routine.
00:08:22.220 I used to be one of those guys that get up
00:08:23.600 and had a very structured morning routine.
00:08:25.000 And I was like, I wonder what would happen
00:08:27.300 if I actually just woke up and started to work.
00:08:29.940 Turned out, really good move.
00:08:31.800 Now, do I recommend people start there?
00:08:33.600 No, because they hadn't built the discipline of execution.
00:08:36.420 They didn't even understand what that 5% is.
00:08:38.020 They didn't build the muscle
00:08:39.040 of actually just getting up and working.
00:08:41.440 So if you don't have a process to get ready for work
00:08:43.560 and you're new to this, it'll hurt you.
00:08:45.540 But deleting things, pruning things is a powerful strategy.
00:08:49.060 The third is delegate.
00:08:50.320 And this is why I always tell people
00:08:51.760 to start with a part-time assistant
00:08:53.620 because most people are not good at this.
00:08:56.800 Most people, when they ask somebody else to do something,
00:08:58.740 it ends up not getting done the way they want it and the person ends up getting involved and it
00:09:03.580 doesn't save them any more time because they don't know how to learn to let go the way we do this is
00:09:07.640 we got a handoff with clarity define what the definition of done looks like and practice
00:09:13.340 delegating because it is an art one of my core philosophies to really get more time back to
00:09:18.740 focus on my five percent is to train don't tell see if i'm telling everybody what to do then i get
00:09:23.640 stuck in this tell check next doom loop of always having people relying on me to get work done
00:09:29.240 instead I train them on how to think this way that's why I create this content is because it's
00:09:34.700 for you and it's all the people on all my teams when you learn to let go you got to be sure to
00:09:39.840 train them on how you did it a checklist is not enough some people are like I have an SOP not
00:09:45.120 enough role play with them teach them the mental models think about the first principles how do
00:09:49.580 you think about this? What are the frameworks you use? If you're mad that people are in a meeting
00:09:53.840 and they're not contributing to the meeting, have you ever taught them how to? And if you don't know
00:09:57.980 how to train people, the good news is there's this really powerful, expensive tool that you might
00:10:02.440 have heard of called ChatGPT. It's free. Use it. Now I know choosing one thing is scary. What if
00:10:09.220 you're wrong? Here's my promise. Picking something and doing as much effort and focus on it and
00:10:15.840 learning and getting feedback is always the winning move versus doing too many things and
00:10:21.440 playing a game of whack-a-mole in the dark. It's like fighting an invisible monster. At least this
00:10:26.860 way, you can eliminate things knowing they didn't work versus not knowing what's broken. Now, if you
00:10:33.020 want to go deeper on delegating, click this video and I'll see you on the other side.