Dan Martell - June 06, 2025


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

Topics
95-5 rule
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Bill Gates Elon Musk Zuckerberg Optimus
Everything seems cringe until you win Schools teach the wrong things

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

217.6

Word count

2,308

Sentence count

148

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.