If you want 2026 to be the best year of your life, please listen to this episode

Picture this. It's December 31, 2026. You're looking back at the year and you finally stuck to your goals. Your income is higher than it's ever been. You're in the best shape you've been in years. You've built habits you actually kept. And you're surrounded by people who push you to level up, not hold you back. Does that sound unreal? Let me tell you, it's not. As someone who's been able to create the life of my dreams and help many people do the same, I want to share with you the exact blueprint you can use to achieve any goal you have and more. So you can look back at this moment at the end of the year and think, "Hell yeah, actually did it." 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. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martell method.com. Step one, define the direction. Direction for me is the big picture. See, most people get stuck because they have no clarity. The reason why you're having a hard time deciding is because you don't know what you want to create. You watching this, this year coming up, it's your f***ing year. And without a clean North Star, even productive days can take you the wrong way. Imagine you got a bone arrow and you're trying to hit a target. If you can't see it, how in the heck are you supposed to hit it? So this is how you define your North Star and I do this every year. First off, write one, big goal. And we're going to call this your vision. You have to make it smart. SMART, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. And if you want my pro tip, we have to visualize it. Our mind doesn't think in words, it thinks in picture. So we take that picture of that one big goal, okay? That vision we want to create for our life. We put it at the background wallpaper of our phone. We put it at the background wallpaper of our laptop. We print it off. We put it in the bathroom mirror. So we have to look at it every day. That's what the pros do. They visualize their outcome. So then what I do is I define 12 projects for the year. These are things that I want to accomplish that are aligned with that vision. I call those power goals. And then I save them on my phone so they're easy to access. And then next, and this is what most people never do. I pick one with the biggest impact, the one project that I know. If I don't get anything else done, that one will lead and unlock the vision I want to have for my life. And then lastly, what I do is I take that one project. And I turn it into daily actions. Essentially, I call those minns. Most important next step. Each day, I ask myself, what's the most important next step to move that project for that's aligned with my goal? I believe most people mess this up because they don't understand the 300% rule. It's something I came up with a long time ago that makes the idea of attracting things into your life incredibly easy. See, if you have 100% clarity, and then you have 100% belief around that, and you can hold that 100% of the time, that's how you attract your ideal life into existence today. And that's what we need to define our direction. So once you know where you're headed, it's time to figure out exactly where you're starting, because a direction without awareness is just a guess, which takes us to step number two, audit where you are today. When people ask me, Dan, what is it that you do to be successful? I always say it's not what I do. It's what I don't do. I don't gamble. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I don't sit there and waste my time. You can't eliminate the distractions that are pulling you away from your ideal life until you know what those are. Back when I was in my early 20s, I had a company and I had big ambitions, big goals, big dreams. The problem was that I had more things I had to get done than the week was going to allow. And I remember talking to somebody and they said, Hey, Dan, I think you just need to figure out what you got to stop because adding more stuff isn't going to make the problem go away. So what I did is I sat down and I actually audited my calendar. The amount of waste that I found in my week where I thought I was being productive was wild. That taught me how to do a time and energy audit, how to hire a virtual assistant to start managing my inbox and my calendar. And that gave me the time to focus on building people, developing relationships, on working on the projects that would create the future that I need to spend time on. So here's how you run a time and energy audit that's simple and crazy powerful. The first thing is we have to look at your typical weekly calendar. Most people don't put enough into their calendar. So if you have it, you're going to have to go and set a timer where it goes off every 15 minutes and you log it. Once you do that, I want you to go and highlight each energy block and I want you to either say it's in green, yellow or red. Green means it gave you energy, yellow means that it's neutral and red means it sucked your energy. So then what I do is I look at all the green tasks or projects and I'm like, I got that. Then I've got my yellows and I'm like, okay, how do I make those green potentially? Or are those yellows eventually going to become red and I look at the red stuff and make sure when you're doing your time audit that you're doing personal and professional time. I don't care if it's I woke up at seven on Saturday morning. What did you do for the first 90 minutes? Write that down. Once I have that, I have a clear focus of all the red things that take my energy that doesn't add to my life and I try to find ways that I can get leveraged. When I first did this, I was looking at stuff like cleaning, cooking, shopping, running errands, bills. I mean, it's all the busy work that actually doesn't move your life forward that doesn't take your specific energy and focus. We either want to start by just deleting it. Most of the things you can just stop doing, renegotiate with the people you made commitments to and just delete it out of your calendar. The second thing is we want to ask ourselves, can we delegate this to somebody else? Can we ask for help? Can we get an intern? The goal is to maximize the green and give you the space to execute on your power goals. When you look back on 2026, I want your calendar to be full of green, not the yellows and reds. That is the mission. Now that you know where you stand, it's time to build the habits and routines that turn your yearly goals into consistent daily wins. 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, two Elzen 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. Step three, create daily systems. Big goals are built on small, consistent wins. Systems stand for save yourself time, energy, money and stress and those beat motivation every day. Just like recently, my friend Kinsey who travels with us and works with us, I mean, she has a big vision for her life. She has races she wants to do. She has travels she wants to do. She's got to manage a lot of projects for my wife and I and she was just feeling overwhelmed. So we just sat down, rode everything down that was on her projects list and I showed her how to use her calendar to actually create the systems to get out of her head and into a digital form that is repeatable. This is exactly what I did with her that you can do for yourself to make sure that 2026 is your best year ever. First off, we have to design the next morning, the day before. Like truthfully, on Sunday night, I plan my week and I have those three key projects or tasks that I want to move forward in the morning. The first 90 minutes as soon as I wake up, I want to attack the day. That's why most productive people attack their mornings is because when they have the most energy, the most discipline, they want to build that momentum. Next, I like to break those outcomes into 25 minute. What's called Pomodoro Spritz. I use a simple timer on my laptop and I hit play and I got 25 minutes to get as much work as I can get done. I also listen to no word EDM. You can find this for free on Spotify or whatever tool you use to listen to music that focuses my brain on the outcome. 25 minutes goes by. The timer goes off. I got five minutes to stretch, get some water, move my body, then boom sit back down, hit start again. I mean, this works so well that I even have my son Max, who's 13 and has to do his homework as we travel the world. Do this on his own. Productive every morning, three hours, school's done on with his life. If you don't move your body, you don't reset things. Creative work is never going to come from it. And finally, this is where the whole process makes it impossible for you not to transform your life is to review your 12 power goals three times a day. I have triggers where I sit down and I review my power goals. They're on my phone. I just have them on my notes. I want to remind myself what my focus is. I want to ask myself, does my calendar reflect my priorities? These are my priorities. Have I had the conversations with the right people to start these, move these things forward and am I keeping the most important thing the most important thing? Too often people get really productive, focused on a direction that isn't aligned with what they said they wanted to create. If every time that happened, you just kind of reset and went forward reset and went forward reset went forward three times a day. Then when a person calls me and says, Hey, Dan, I've got to stay in this afternoon. Any chance you can stop by. Unfortunately, I can't have already committed my time. The power of saying no is one of the most powerful tools you have to actually change your life. And if you want 2026 to be your best year ever, that's going to be absolutely crucial. Now, creating systems that make it easy to stay on track is awesome. But if you really want to hit your goals in 2026, you're going to need to take this and multiply it. How? Step number four, create leverage. The most successful people in the world, they don't work harder. They just know how to pull bigger levers. See, Archimedes said that if you give me a lever long enough, I could actually lift the world. Leverage means small inputs, little bit of pulling, big outputs, the whole globe lifting up. That's the game changer. It's the person that understands how to use leverage that will create the most in their life. When I look at an Elon Musk, a Jeff Bezos, etc. Those guys just have massive leverage points. If I want to do more in my life, I got to understand how this stuff works. It's things like automation and AI just as examples that multiply your efforts so that progress literally compounds over time. So in 2008, I decided to move to San Francisco and I had just sold my company and it was such a crazy experience of overwhelmed working 100 hour weeks. It was so bad that I almost decided to never start another business. And if I didn't meet this guy in the vault, who shared with me these four ideas around leverage, I probably would have never started another company. I would have just kept investing as an angel investor. But these are the four C's and I want you to write them down. The first one is code. Understanding how do you software automation and today AI to get a bunch of stuff done for you. The other C is content. How do you create a repeatable checklist and SOP standard operating procedure? Or even just a video teaching somebody how to do something. So you never have to teach it again. Massive leverage. The third was capital. How do you leverage money to get more done? That's where the idea of buying back your time really started at scale. Then the fourth C is collaboration. If you learn how to lead people communicate, having other people support your dreams, incredible leverage. And what that unlocked for me was the idea that I only had four things get really good at and I could create anything. And the best part is that it allows me to do less and actually get more. That's how you're going to make 2026 the best year ever. So you can't give your life more time, but you can give your time more life. These are three strategies you can do today to get more leverage. First, we have to automate. You cannot keep doing the same thing every day yourself. You have to automate that task. So find one repetitive task. You can automate this week. It could be your email processing. It could be pulling reports. Think about all the red stuff that you probably pulled out of your audit. Those are things that I would absolutely attack to automate. So you never have to do them again. They still get to get done. You just don't need to be the person to do it. Then we want to focus on delegate. I want you to look at your list of things. I have to get done and ask yourself what's one thing that you can delegate to another person or ask AI to do. And I know a lot of people they're like, well, what if I give it to somebody and they don't do it as good as me? Here's my rule. 80% done by somebody else is 100% and awesome. I also created this framework called the 1080 10 rule, which allows me to create the first 10% which is the outcome, the creative part to collaborate with somebody. Maybe it's the chat GPT prompts and then have somebody else take over the 80% right? That's the execution. That might even be setting up the automation. So I never have to do an AI does it or a person does it. The last 10% is taking the output back that might show up as an email or a text message to me and then massaging that for the final output. My philosophy is really moved from being a doer to a director. I want to direct people. I want to direct the AI. I don't want to be sitting there doing tasks. And finally, we need to duplicate. This one relates to your time. Think about finding two tasks that you can stack on top of each other and do at the same time that allows you to get them both done without taking any extra time. That's what's called net time. No extra time. For example, I like to go on scooter rides and be outside in the sun next to the lake. My team needs one-on-ones. I put those together. So all my one-on-ones I do outside on a scooter. Another fun fact. I also enjoy being in hot tub. I also have to review my slack and make sure I respond to the things that require my attention. Guess what? I put them together. You can literally put a lot of stuff together that gets the things done that requires no extra time. So that's how you create leverage with your time. Now that you've multiplied your time and your output, it's time to level up your environment. And we got to start with the people around you. This might be the most important. Before we get back to the episode, if you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you. It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode. Step number five, network specifically around people and boundaries. This is what's crazy. The people around you will shape your floor and your ceiling. The energy, the mindset, those are contagious. You are a byproduct of the people you spend time with. You have to audit your circle. The friendmentory I call it. Who keeps pushing you forward and who keeps pushing you back? Or worse, celebrates when you decide to want to give up. So we have to build intentional connections that match where you want to be, not where you are, and most definitely not where you were. When I look at my life and those times that I've leveled up, there's always been people involved. Always. Mentors, peers, advisors, groups of people, communities, and that's just been the through line for everything in my life. And the reason why is because proximity of people is freaking power. And you hear this all the time, but your network truly is your net worth. So you need to make sure you ask yourself these four questions about your friends and your circle. Number one, are they on a growth journey themselves? See, I don't want to be around people that have decided where they're at is good enough. I want to invest in relationships with people that are also going places that I haven't been so that as they go on their journey, I go on my journey, we can share notes. We can talk about what's working for each other. That, to me, is a very simple decision and most people have decided to just stop. The second question you should ask yourself, if somebody said to you, you remind them of that other friend of yours, would that make you proud? It's a simple question, but it also talks about character. The third question is, would I let my child date someone like them? One of my favorite compliments to give somebody is to say, I would trust you to date my sister. That, to me, is the highest form of compliment when I look at the people in my life. Do I trust that person with somebody in my life? If the answer's no, then why am I spending time with them? And finally, number four, do they make me better or do they drain my energy? Are they energy amplifiers or are they energy vampires? Do I walk away spending time with them going that was light, easy, fun, expansive? Or is it like they made me feel bad about myself? They made me feel like I wasn't doing good enough? I either start with, hey, is this person I want to keep in my life? Hell yes. If it's not a hell yes, it's an easy no. Now that might sound harsh, but it's necessary if you want to protect your time, focus, and energy because the people that don't value their time will only waste yours. You're doing everything you can to get time back to cut stuff, to keep in the energy to make 2026 your best year, and then they're just going to suck that out of you. No, you fight to keep it. They have to earn the right to be in your life. And I know the hardest part is family, friends you've known since high school, you're going to have to start setting some boundaries. I can love a family member from a distance. I don't have to call them every day. I don't have to invite them to a barbecue this weekend. I don't have to say yes to everything they invite me to. You're allowed to set some criteria and say, hey, if this is how you want to choose your life, that's fine. No judgment. I actually love that for you. It's just not what I need. You have to put yourself first. You have to increase yourself worth. You have to let people know this is my new standard. And that's okay. So making sure your friendventory is filled with people who are pulling you forward, not holding you back, is a huge thing to hit your goal in 2026. Now you need to measure growth and stay accountable to it. Step number six, you've got to stay on track. To stay on track, you need two things. You need to measure and you need accountability. When you track progress, it makes the invisible growth visible. See, a lot of people are losing weight and they don't even know. A lot of people are making gains on their finances, but they don't even know because they don't measure anything. That will keep the motivation high. Accountability, that's next level. I do that through partnerships, through systems, through public commitments to my goals. It creates follow through. It creates what I call positive peer pressure without it. The willpower will fade out because you'll do 10 times more for somebody else than you'll ever do for yourself. So being accountable to somebody else, saying, "Hey, I'll meet you at the gym at 7 a.m. You will show up because they're going to be there. If it's on you, maybe not." My favorite story is a woman that works for me named Jett. She set a goal to get to 20% body fat. I think it was like 38 pounds she had to lose in four months. She set the stake that if she didn't hit it, she could no longer work at the company. That became a non-negotiable. That became a forcing function to execute, and that transformed her into the person that hit her goal. The stakes are high. Most people don't have that level of accountability, and it's easy to give up. Here's why. What you measure gets managed. So these are three ways you can do this for yourself. The first is you got to find a North Star metric for your goal, and then you got to attack that one metric with the aggression every fricking day. So for Jen, it was body fat percentage. How did she do that? She had a scale every day she got on. She reported it to her coach, and then she also did a DeXa scan to make sure it was super accurate. For you, it might be revenue. It might be amount of pages you get done every day if you're trying to study for some kind of test. It might be the amount of kilometers you're running because you're training for a marathon. Whatever it is, pick that one metric, be obsessed about it, and look at it every day. Second is you build a scorecard, and this is so easy with AI. You can literally take everything in this video and ask AI to do it, and it'll do it. You'll like give the link to AI and say, help me design and implement what Dan just taught me. Boom, done. But with the scorecard, and I really am a big fan of you tracking it and putting it in the scorecard, it creates this tactical accountability. And then you look at it and you track it every day. I learned a long time ago that the more you look at something, the more you talk about something, the higher the probability of achieving it. And last, get an accountability partner. Find somebody that you trust that you would care if you didn't deliver on that you would be accountable to make a public commitment to stay consistent. I mean, the easiest thing is to go and set your stakes publicly on your Facebook page and say, hey, I've got a vision for my life. Here's what I accomplished by the end of the year. I'm committed to it. Here's the person who's going to hold me accountable to it. If you see me, please ask me about it. That will make it a must. And if you follow this whole process, actually achieving your goals in 2026 won't just be possible. It'll be inevitable. Now, I know this process might feel overwhelming, but let me break it down to really simple simplicity beats inspiration. If you can just take one goal, break it down into projects, and then what is the most important next step? And you have clarity around those steps. That is way better than the motivation to do something massive. Most people don't start because they don't have clarity. Just keep it simple. If you have that one thing, then the discipline of execution is the bridge that turns that vision into reality. Thanks for listening to 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 or claim their freedom and build their empire.