Work-life balance is a luxury. Buy it later.

At 23, I’ve become a multi-millionaire and built two $20 million dollar companies by refusing to believe in work-life balance.

This is the only truth I live by: your 20s are the cheapest years you’ll ever have to buy your 40s.

Career advisors, HR departments, and most of the internet will tell a twenty-something to protect their work-life balance at all costs.

It’s framed as the mature, responsible choice, when it’s really the mechanism that keeps a person standing in the same place at 40 that they occupied at 25, because every hour spent protecting a comfortable life is an hour that didn’t go toward building a different one.

I started college at 17 and built a seven-figure social media marketing agency out of my dorm room by 18 that worked with presidential candidates and celebrities.

That very company, Step Up Social, would eventually merge with online marketing agency The Candid Network.

By 19, I was operating on a philosophy most people around me considered insane: say no to almost everything now, so you get to say yes to anything later.

There’s a reason this only works when you’re this young.

Your twenties are the one decade where you’re at your physical and cognitive peak at the exact moment you have the fewest people depending on you: no spouse’s career to weigh against your own, no children’s school district, no aging parents who need you nearby yet.

That window closes on its own, whether you use it or not.

I’m 23 now, and this is the truth I live by.

Every sacrifice I make now is buying me the right to stop negotiating my life back one weekend at a time later on in life.

What saying “no” actually buys you I once turned down an internship that would have paid roughly $5,000 a month, because the same hours poured into my own company were worth an order of magnitude more on a longer curve.

I went out twice in college.