The Real Reason I Quit Drinking

About this video

Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur and creator of SaaS Academy, explains why he quit drinking almost a decade ago, saying next May will be ten years without a drop. He describes an addictive personality, teenage drug addiction and rehab where he discovered programming, then a return to casual drinking while building a startup in San Francisco. Friction grew when his wife Rene was pregnant and kept drinking while she had stopped. On a trip to Exuma in the Bahamas, after buying supplies for a week and behaving badly on the first night, he projected 25 years ahead, feared causing pain to his family, and decided while drunk that he was done — a decision Rene initially did not believe. He frames change through three beliefs: the pain has to be deep enough to motivate it, including breaking a family pattern of alcoholism he traces through his mother and grandparents for his son Max; you only have to get through today, a lesson he links to Alcoholics Anonymous and to focusing on the next telephone pole in Ironman races and the next 500 metres in a long swim across Okanagan Lake; and an identity shift — he does not say he quit, he says ‘I just don’t drink’ and tells people he is allergic to it, using non-alcoholic versions instead. He closes with the quote, ‘I’m not what happens to me. I am what I choose to become.’

Key takeaways

• Change sticks when the pain is framed deeply enough — Martell says picturing pain he could cause his unborn child over the next 25 years was the ignition, not the drinking itself.
• Shrink the commitment to today only: get through today, the next telephone pole in a race, or the next 500 metres, then reassess and build momentum.
• Make it an identity shift, not an effort: ‘I didn’t quit drinking, I don’t drink’ removes daily decision pressure, in his account.
• Martell says he avoids gambling, video games and other triggers because he knows he has an addictive personality, and channels that intensity into business, triathlons, and being a husband and father.
• He wanted to be the generation that broke the family pattern — he says his mother is an alcoholic and her parents were alcoholics, and his kids will not experience that normalcy from him.

Episode details: published October 10, 2022 · 13:51 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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