Quick test: score yourself 1 to 5 on mission, health, love, friends, hobbies, spirituality, and money. Be honest. I just watched a video from Dan Martell, the entrepreneur behind Buy Back Your Time, where he calls the grind-everything lifestyle “modern life disease,” and this scoring habit is his cure. He’d exited three companies, hit every number, and still felt empty. So the creator built a system to make sure no part of his life ever slides to zero.
The whole thing runs on seven pillars. Here’s how he works through them.
📋 The seven pillars, step by step
- Mission. The expert starts here, not with money. His tool is the “WHO test”: the Wound you’re willing to share, the Human you want to help, the Outcome you want for them. His sentence: “helping young people not feel broken.”
- Health. He uses “SMS”: Sweat every day (45 minutes minimum, never miss two days in a row), Meals on autopilot (same lunch and dinner, no snacks in the house), and Sleep with an alarm for bedtime, not wake-up. He’s in bed at 9 p.m. and up at 4 a.m. without an alarm.
- Love. His “preloaded year” flips the usual calendar. Birthdays, anniversaries, and quarterly trips with his wife go in first. Work fills in around them.
- Friends. Do a “friend inventory.” List everyone you gave real time to in the last 90 days, then ask if each person pushes you to grow or keeps you stuck. Create space from the second group. No breakup speech needed, just slower replies.
- Hobbies. The three Fs: Fun, Frequent, Friends. He runs a weekly Tuesday hike and has for five years.
- Spirituality. Three gratitudes every morning, one of them completely ordinary. Then sit with the list for 60 seconds.
- Finances. A “daily cash report” across every account each morning. Decide how to deploy it, then move on with your day.
🔍 What your scores mean
Circle your two lowest numbers. Those are your assignments for next week. Two specific actions, in the calendar. Then re-score next Sunday.
Low love score? Book the date night. Low friends score? Text the person you keep meaning to see. That’s the whole loop. The mind behind it has tracked this on a spreadsheet for over a decade, and he credits it for keeping every pillar alive while the business grew.
The idea that stuck with me most: he argues you don’t make money, you attract it. Work hard on you, and the bank account follows. That’s why money sits at pillar seven on purpose.
💡 Extra tips
- Grind seasons are fine. The disease is when a season quietly becomes the norm.
- Make hard decisions easy and easy decisions hard. His peanut butter lives at the corner store, not in his kitchen.
- Love is spelled T-I-M-E. His kids didn’t care about the private plane, they cared whether dad played with them.
- Spend time with people who want more for you than from you.
- Never confuse busy with winning. One guy told him he hadn’t really seen his kids in three years and couldn’t say what for.
🎯 Grab a pen this Sunday and run the test
Then watch the full video for the stories behind each pillar, including the shingles scare that forced him to start having fun. It’s a wake-up call worth 20 minutes!