‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre

For financial freedom by age 30, optimize ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years.

What if I told you that the notion of work-life balance is keeping a generation from reshaping the global economy?

I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million. I’ve signed up my alma mater as a client, connected with billionaire mentors and secured deferred admission to Stanford’s M.B.A. program. When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.

In 2020 when I entered Miami University in Ohio, I calculated that I had roughly 1,460 days to build something meaningful before the “real world” demanded that I conform to a traditional career after graduation. That works out to 35,040 hours. Most students subtract sleep (8 hours a day), classes (6 hours), and basic necessities (2 hours), leaving them with 8 hours a day to spend on “life”—entertainment, clubs, dating, hanging out with friends and other activities that rarely move the needle on long-term goals.

I took a different approach and spent my time building a social-media company from my dorm room. That business, Step Up Social, helped companies grow on TikTok and Instagram Reels. It hit $1 million a year in revenue in less than two years. During my first year working on Step Up Social, I averaged 3½ hours of sleep a night and had about 12½ hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety. But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.

My approach reflects a broader shift among successful young entrepreneurs. The traditional path—college, corporate career, 401(k), retirement—delivers diminishing returns. People barely older than we are have disrupted entire industries. We understand that the window for building something meaningful is narrow, and the tools to do it often are already in our hands.

Older generations call this pace unsustainable, but I call it front-loading success. My peers who have made similar choices also are taking advantage of unlimited access to information, global markets and productivity tools with the goals of making money and, crucially, creating options for ourselves.

The median starting salary for U.S. college graduates is $55,000, which means earning your first million takes years. But if you optimize ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years, you could achieve financial freedom by 30 and buy yourself choices for the rest of your life.

Building wealth this way requires sacrifices most people aren’t willing to make. Here’s what that looked like for me:

• Outsource everything nonessential. I hired a cleaning lady, subscribed to meal delivery services, and cut out every task that could be done by someone else for less than what my time was worth according to our business’s hourly rates. When your company is generating thousands of dollars a day, spending $100 to skip grocery shopping is a no-brainer.

• Prune social networks. I filtered every social commitment through three questions: Would I rather be building my company or spending time on this? Will this relationship survive if I skip this event? And if not, is this someone I really need in my life? The isolation was painful, and some friendships didn’t survive. This approach may sound harsh, but it’s about giving priority to the kind of relationships that can weather your ambitions, rather than those that require constant maintenance through surface-level social events.

• Optimize academic life. From the start, I treated college like a business decision. I gave priority to classes graded purely on exams rather than attendance, and did my best to attend only if the subject matter was related to my business ventures or business interests. I steered clear of courses that banned laptops in the classroom, because I couldn’t be offline for three or more hours a day when my team (and clients) needed me. Plus, it isn’t 1999, and that kind of thinking won’t get us anywhere.

• Adopt a zero-base calendar. Every commitment had to justify its place on my calendar, with social events, casual hangouts and even family gatherings weighed against business priorities. I constantly felt guilty about missing important moments with loved ones, but, ironically, the relationships that mattered most grew stronger, because the time I did spend with them was deeply intentional.

• Optimize transportation. This one is unconventional, I’ll admit, but I’ve used helicopters to cut travel time between meetings. It may sound excessive until you calculate the opportunity cost: A three-hour drive vs. a 20-minute flight frees up extra hours for closing deals, reviewing strategy or working with and mentoring my team.

I’m not suggesting that everyone eliminate work-life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre. The path I chose was painful. There’s no sugarcoating the mental-health struggles, the physical deterioration or the social isolation that came with this intensity. But in a winner-takes-all economy, extreme efficiency during your peak physical and mental years becomes a baseline for building wealth that lasts a lifetime.

I plan to become a billionaire by age 30. Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality. The formula is simple: Sacrifices I make now are an investment in decades of choice later.

Mr. Barr is founder of Step Up Social, managing partner of Candid Network and a co-founder of Flashpass.

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