Memorandum
- From
- Derek Weston via Fortune | FORTUNE
- Date
- Filed
- Business·5 min to read
- Re
Young Entrepreneur Argues Work-Life Balance Is a Luxury Best Deferred
ReYoung Entrepreneur Argues Work-Life Balance Is a Luxury Best Deferred
A 23-year-old multimillionaire and founder of two $20 million companies makes the case that sacrificing balance in your twenties is the surest way to buy freedom later, challenging the quiet-quitting ethos of his generation.
A 23-year-old entrepreneur who has built two companies valued at $20 million is challenging the prevailing career advice given to young workers, arguing that work-life balance is a luxury that should be deferred rather than protected. In a commentary published by Fortune, the founder contends that the twenties represent the cheapest years a person will ever have to buy their forties, and that treating comfort as a priority is the mechanism that keeps people standing in the same place at 40 that they occupied at 25.
The author, who started college at 17 and built a seven-figure social media marketing agency from his dorm room by 18, describes a philosophy of saying no to almost everything early so that one can say yes to anything later. His agency, Step Up Social, eventually merged with online marketing agency The Candid Network. He argues that the twenties are uniquely suited to this approach because they represent the one decade when a person is at their physical and cognitive peak at the exact moment they have the fewest people depending on them — no spouse's career to weigh against one's own, no children's school district, and no aging parents requiring nearby support. That window, he writes, closes on its own whether it is used or not.
The commentary offers concrete examples of the trade-offs involved. The author says he once turned down an internship paying roughly $5,000 a month because the same hours poured into his own company were worth far more on a longer curve. He acknowledges going out only twice during college and rejecting sleep almost entirely, averaging 3.5 hours a night to spend more time growing his businesses. While he concedes this damaged his health in the short term, he says he would gladly do it again. He also frames skipping three years of family holidays as a minimal cost against being able to fully cover a parent's medical care later without financial strain — a trade he says bought both more time with loved ones and a higher quality of that time.
The author is explicit about the quality of life he is pursuing: a stake in a Formula 1 team rather than a ticket to watch one, and the best hotel in the world rather than a budget chain. He cites a mentor's advice to aim for a $100 million outcome instead of a $1 million one, since hitting 10% of the larger number beats fully hitting the smaller one. The same logic, he argues, applies on the way in — the road to the top 1% runs through saying no to the mediocre version first.
A central tension in the piece concerns Generation Z, which the author says is being handed two contradictory instructions: reject traditional employment and build something of your own, but also protect your peace and quiet-quit whatever drains you. He points to survey data showing that 94% of Gen Z are so afraid of burnout that they forgo leadership as a top career goal, yet 76% still say they want to be executives eventually and 43% plan to start a business this year. The majority of his generation, he writes, wants the title and the power without the grind it has always taken to earn either one.
The author also argues that there is no alpha in conformity, suggesting that doing what everyone else in a graduating class is doing makes an outlier result unlikely. Schools and mainstream media preach balance, he writes, because it is the safe and defensible advice to give a room of 20-year-olds, but that same advice is why economic inequality keeps concentrating. Balance, in his framing, protects the floor a person is already standing on but can never build a new one.
Looking ahead, the commentary contends that comfort is the real risk as artificial intelligence reshapes which roles even exist. Twenty-somethings optimizing for a comfortable middle, he warns, are optimizing for a floor that may not hold much longer. Building a business that no algorithm can fire you from is, in his view, the only real job security left. He describes treating personal capacity like capital — spending it where it compounds and cutting whatever quietly drains it — and cites hiring a driver for trips over 30 minutes, a private chef who builds meals for sustained energy, and even training himself out of carsickness so a routine drive does not cost a working hour. It sounds excessive, he writes, until the math on what an hour of best thinking is worth makes it the easiest choice in the world.
The piece closes by framing youth as a decision about which version of life a person will be negotiating with at 40: the one they built or the one they protected. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
