The 7 Things I Score Every Sunday (Money Comes Last on Purpose)

I hit the number, looked around, and realized every other part of my life had quietly gone to zero. This is the system I’ve run every Sunday for over a decade so that never happens again.

I’d exited three companies. On paper, I’d won. Anybody in my life would have told you that.

And I had a hole in me I couldn’t explain.

So I called a friend who I knew could help, and I ended up in Peru. Visiting orphanages. Hiking through the mountains. Three days sitting in silence trying to work out what the whole thing had actually been for.

It would have been easy to spend that week thinking about the next company to start, the next investment to make. Instead the question that cracked me wide open was this one: who do you want to help avoid the pain, or get through it faster?

That’s when I understood what had gone wrong. I’d spent a decade optimizing one number while everything else in my life ran on fumes.

Look, there are seasons where you put your head down and attack. That part isn’t the problem. The problem is when the season turns into a year, the year turns into two, and the grind stops being a sprint and becomes your personality. Then you wake up in ten years and the bank account is the only thing that moved.

So I built a scorecard. Seven parts of my life, scored one to five, every Sunday, for over a decade. Here’s what’s on it, and why money sits at the bottom.

1. Mission

This one goes first because when money is the reason, you quit the second it stops showing up or it gets hard.

The moment I wrote my mission on paper, my whole being shifted. Ten years ago nobody knew the story of my addiction, my teenage years, what I went through as a kid. Now if you talk to me for six minutes, I’ll tell you, because it’s what made me. I’m here so that no young person has to feel broken. You might know me as the guy who teaches you how to make money. That’s the byproduct.

Somebody asks me how to find their purpose at every single talk, and my answer never changes. I call it the WHO test, and you can run it tonight.

• W is the wound. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you, and are you willing to share it? Your purpose sits right next to it.
• H is the human. Who specifically do you want to help? Give yourself permission to be specific. I’ve spoken at Pelican Bay and San Quentin, and honestly, I don’t resonate with the adults. But when I walk into a detention center and I’m looking at a kid with that pain behind their eyes, I know they didn’t have somebody like me in their life. That’s my human.
• O is the outcome. What’s the transformation? Helping somebody feel seen, feel believed in, feel like they’re not broken. That can be the thing that changes their entire life.

Read all three out loud as one sentence. For me it’s “helping young people not feel broken.” Your mess is your message.

2. Health

I was a millionaire standing on stages telling people how to be successful, and every so often a photo of me would show up online and I’d think, who is that guy? I was fat. I was tired all the time. I’d lied to myself about it long enough that it felt normal.

What saved me was a friend who looked at me and said, “Hey bro, not a good look.” Some people hear that and wonder what kind of friend says that. I needed that friend. I didn’t need the one who agreed with me.

Then I started moving. Not a half marathon. A 5K was a big deal. I just kept at it. Seven or eight Ironmans later, a few ultramarathons, sitting at 9 to 10% body fat, and here’s the part nobody tells you: my bank account grew in direct proportion to my energy. The person talking to you right now, I built him, and I built him by putting health first instead of last.

Sweat every day. 45 minutes minimum, and you have to actually break a sweat. Walk with a weight vest, incline on the treadmill, CrossFit, whatever. Life gets busy, so make one rule: never miss two days in a row. Miss one and you’re human. Miss two and you’ve started a trend.

Kill the food decisions. I have an addiction to peanut butter, so guess what isn’t in my house? If I want it, I have to get in the car and drive to the corner store. Meanwhile my meal prep is exactly what I like: lean ground beef, sweet potatoes, greens, low-calorie hot sauce, same thing every day. When I’m going to a restaurant, my assistant pre-orders off the menu and drops it in the calendar invite, so when they ask what I’m having, I just read it. If you want to make a lot of money, learn to make the hard decisions easy and the easy decisions hard.

Sleep. People ask what time I wake up. 4am. They say that’s insane. It isn’t, because I’m in bed at 9. I don’t set an alarm to wake up. I set one for 8:30pm to start shutting down. That’s the one people skip.

3. Love

I remember flying private with my kids, on our way to do something fun, and I spent the entire flight on my phone. My son asked me three times to play with him. I didn’t hear him once.

I could have blamed the engine noise. It wasn’t the engine noise.

That’s when it landed: he didn’t care about the plane. He didn’t care where we were going. He wanted his dad to play with him. Love is spelled T-I-M-E. So if you tell me you love me, where you at?

In my book I close on a story about a guy who came up after a talk and said he felt horrible. I asked why. He said, “I haven’t seen my kids in three years.” He saw them on weekends, sure. But for three straight years he left before they woke up and got home after they were asleep, because of decisions he made in his business. Then he said the part that stuck with me: for what? So I can feel good about myself in front of people I don’t even like?

He doesn’t get those years back.

Here’s the uncomfortable one. Sometimes the people closest to you get the worst version of you. You’re nicer to a stranger in a boardroom than you are to your family on a Saturday.

The system I use so I don’t drop this ball is called the preloaded year, and I got it from my buddy Taki. I do it with my wife at the end of every year for the following year, and we review it constantly. What makes it work is that it runs backwards from how most people plan. Most people load in the work first. I load the people first: the anniversaries, the birthdays, the quarterly trips with my wife, the stuff I’d want to do if I had a month left. Those go in as priority. The work sorts itself out around them.

You don’t know when your last day is going to be your last day. Put those in first.

4. Friends

When I was 17 and in rehab, they made us write something called a transition plan. You sit down and decide who you’re going to spend time with when you get out. Because if you walk back into the same rooms with the same people, there’s zero chance you stay sober.

That plan is the reason I’m here.

I became the byproduct of who I spent time with. So I moved away from the people who were addicted and negative and always somehow in the middle of drama, and toward people who played sports, ate well, and enjoyed their lives without doing anything illegal. Revolutionary stuff, I know.

Be careful who you call a friend. Sitting next to somebody in 11th grade English doesn’t make them a friend. It makes you know them. You want people who want more for you than from you.

So run a friend inventory tonight, on paper:

1. List everyone you’ve given real time to in the last 90 days.
2. For each one, ask: is this person pushing me to grow in every area, or keeping me stuck?
3. Be honest about the ones you excuse. “They’re family, they’re always like that” is an excuse. They might not mean any harm, but the person who opens every conversation with “did you see what’s on the news?” is still handing you something.
4. Create space. You don’t owe anyone a breakup speech. Just be slower to reply.
5. Pick two or three people you should be spending more time with, and put them in the preloaded year.

Tomorrow I’m getting on a plane, flying an hour, then driving two more, to show up for two hours for a friend doing something hard. I want him to see me there. That’s not an accident, that’s the list working.

5. Fun

When I was 31, I went to see a doctor friend about a weird patch on my back. He left the room, came back with pills, and said one word: shingles. Then he pulled up a photo of what it would have looked like if I’d waited, my whole back breaking out along the nerve line.

That was my body sending an invoice. I was so driven, so stiff, so unwilling to let loose that I made myself sick.

I’m 46 now and I’d say I’m cured of it. I schedule fun. I organize it. I show up and make it fun. And the business followed, the money showed up, the quality of people around me went through the roof, because nobody wants to do anything with a single-purpose person. Hobbies are an investment in your business.

Three Fs keep it honest:

• Fun. If you don’t smile when you think about doing it, it isn’t fun. You’re allowed to say no.
• Frequent. Once a year is nice. Once a month is better. I do a hike every Tuesday, same time, and I’ve done it for five years. Everybody’s invited, including you.
• Friends. If you woke up tomorrow with a hundred supercars in the driveway and every person you love was gone, you’d trade the whole fleet back in a heartbeat. What you actually want is a room full of people you’ve impacted. So collect great friends and build magical memories with them, more often and bigger each time.

6. Spirituality

This is the one most business people skip entirely, and it’s the reason you can have everything above plus all the money and still feel empty.

I wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time. My happy place is being wildly productive: fifteen-minute blocks, checklists, SOPs. I was extremely good at doing. I had no idea how to just be. And it didn’t matter how much I produced, because if I wasn’t present for any of it, I couldn’t feel it.

A couple dozen times a day now, including while I was recording this, I drop in for a second. When people watch me coach and ask where that came from, I know exactly where it came from. I create early in the morning because that’s when I’m connected to my creator.

What I find fascinating is how many people tell me they’re Christian or Buddhist or Muslim, and when I ask why they don’t bring it to their work, they have no answer. In the middle of the worst week of your life, faith is where the calm is.

Three things keep me connected:

• Write down three things you’re grateful for every morning. The five-minute journal is a great guide and I hand them out like candy.
• Make one of the three completely mundane. The dirt holding a mountain in place. The fact that there’s enough oxygen in the air to feed your body. It has to be so simple it’s almost stupid, and then you actually think about it. I do this one with my kids and it’s my favorite thing we do.
• Sit with the list for 60 seconds. The to-do list will stare at you. Let it.

Gratitude is the best cure for anxiety I’ve ever found. You cannot be grateful and upset at the same time. It’s not possible.

7. Finances

I don’t believe you make money. I think you attract it.

The reason wealthy people are wealthy is that they do more work on themselves than they do in the work. They develop their habits, their character, their skills, their productivity. Yes, you’ll still have to figure out the funnel. You’ll also have to stop being difficult to work with, or nobody refers you and nobody wants the deal.

Which came first, the million-dollar mindset or the million dollars? You have to be valuable before the money shows up.

Managing the money itself takes me about five minutes a day. I call it the daily cash report: every morning I get a snapshot across every account, personal and business, so I know the financial heartbeat of my life. What you measure multiplies. Most people avoid their number, decide they’re probably fine, and don’t notice a wire went out until payroll is at risk.

I read it, decide what to do with what’s there, and move on. Money is a tool. Knowing what it’s doing is the job.

Then ask the real question: what is this money buying? If it’s your time back, if it’s your mission, if it’s the people you love, that’s valuable. If the only answer is to make the number bigger, that’s the disease.

The Sunday scorecard

Every Sunday I score myself one to five on all seven. Did the people I love get my time? Did I ride, did I surf, or did I skip it again? Do I know where the money went and what it’s building?

Then I circle the two lowest and commit to two actions for the coming week. That’s the whole game. It’s in my calendar, it’s on a spreadsheet, I copy and paste it every year, and I’ve done it for over a decade.

If my love score is low, I’m booking date night. If I haven’t seen my friends because I’ve been heads down, I’m fixing it this week. Nothing is ever allowed to reach zero, because you can’t go long without adjusting and still call it a life.

This was never about working hard. There are seasons where you have to push and set a foundation. Just don’t let the season become the norm.

In ten years you’re going to look back at right now and ask whether it was a life well lived. A great life is a life well examined. So go examine it.

-DM