Twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur Emil Barr is sparking a generational debate: is financial freedom by age 30 worth sacrificing sleep, health and friendships?
The Step Up Social founder – who says he built two companies valued at over $20 million – says yes, telling “Fox & Friends” that “extraordinary sacrifice” is the price of “extraordinary achievement.”
“[Being successful required] a lot of sacrifice, and it wasn’t easy and that’s not necessarily something everyone wants to hear,” he said Thursday.
“I saw folks like Elon [Musk] that slept on factory floors to build Tesla and people like Kobe Bryant that trained at 4 a.m., even in the off-season, so I made those same decisions to grow my business.”
Barr doubled down on that message in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, insisting that “‘work-life balance’ will keep you mediocre.”
In the piece, he revealed he had “eliminated work-life balance entirely” and “just worked” to make his dreams come true.
“When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life,” he wrote.
Reactions have been mixed. Barr told host Ainsley Earhardt that some scoffed at his sacrifices, calling them “corporate Karens.” But others, from fellow young entrepreneurs to billionaires who’ve quietly reached out, applauded his message as long overdue.
“I don’t think that we can be, as a generation, Gen Z, the same generation that argues for the four-day work week and then turns around and criticizes the cost of living crisis,” he said.
“We live in the richest country in the world with the highest ever historical income per capita, so there’s never been more opportunity to actually become financially free by your early 20s. You just have to be prepared to make sacrifices to get there.”
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