I moved to San Francisco because I wanted to understand how these 20 year olds built $1,000,000,000 companies. And I meet a guy named Naval Ravikant. I remember I was talking to him once about leverage. The best entrepreneurs have the biggest output for unit of time. Time multiplied by leverage equals output. And this is what I learned. Naval taught me this. There's only 4 master skills to creating leverage.

Once I understood this, I understood I only had 4 things to go become world class at. And I could have anything I want in my life. Most entrepreneurs, when they're growing their business, it doesn't matter if it's their first 100 k or 300 k or 1000000, they get to a place where growing is painful. And in that spot, they usually do 1 to 3 things. They either stall. K? They say to themselves, this year, I made more money last year than this year. I'd rather slow down. Right? And, and and just not grow.

The problem with that is that the market's growing. Right? Gross domestic product grows. Your customers will demand more from you this year than last year. And the the worst part is your top people, if you don't create a future that's big enough for them, then they will go find somebody else who can do that. Does that make sense? Your dreams, write this down, your dreams have to be bigger than everybody else on your team's dreams and goals. Write it down. So that's stall. Number 2.

Sabotage. This one's fascinating. Some of you guys don't even know you're doing this. I have a friend of mine, Tracy. Business was going through some challenges. 6 months of hell. We've all been there. It's tough.

And in that storm, Tracy tells herself, I need to give myself a break. And she decides to take a 4 week sabbatical. Do you think a company that's struggling, the CEO of the company should take a 4 week sabbatical? Yes or yes? No. Perfect. You guys are on the same page. This is great. But she didn't realize she was sabotaging her success. She had an opportunity to keep growing because when we're going through the worst Just so you know this.

When we go through the worst, we're actually developing our skills to get to the next level. Huge. K? So understand when you're challenged, you should say thank you. We're the opponent. This is gonna shape me to become the person I need to become to get to the next level. Instead, Tracy went on to sabbatical. She missed the opportunity to grow. The third is sell.

My buddy Jason called me one day and he's like, hey, man. I think I'm gonna sell my company. He has an agency. 2,000,000 in revenue. Been doing it for about or 8 years and it just became really tough. And I said, Jason, write down all the stuff that you don't like about your business today. Made me a list. And I said, if those things weren't true, would you sell the business? He's like, no.

I said, well, let me invite you to consider a different perspective. I know you wanna go do something else. You think the grass is greener. Here's what I know. You've just hit your new complexity ceiling. We all have them. Write down complexity ceiling. Complexity ceiling.

Anytime it gets hard, I want you to look at that term. I said, it doesn't matter if you solve it now or you leave and start something else. You will hit this same level of complexity where you decide, I don't wanna grow anymore. It's your pain line. So what I wanna share with you today are 3 strategies that overcome that pain line. The first principle that I wanna share with you, and it's a universal principle. It's the buyback principle. We don't hire people to grow our business.

We hire people to buy back our time. It's a calendar over a capacity strategy. See, most entrepreneurs, when they're growing, they go, well, now I need to hire another logo designer. I need to hire another real estate agent. I need to hire another, you know, electrician. And I would say no. You start with your calendar first because here's the deal. If you do the second, you get the first.

But if you do the first, you definitely don't get the second. Most entrepreneurs get to about 1,200,000, about 12 employees where their life starts to get really painful. That pain line is screaming at them every day because they violated this rule. This is the framework. Draw this loop. K? It's a loop. You need to go through these 3 steps to move forward. So every time I hit a pain line k? Today I own dozens of companies and my calendar completely shifts 2 or 3 times a year.