At 23, entrepreneur Emil Barr says he has become a multimillionaire and built two companies worth $20 million by following a philosophy that runs directly against one of Gen Z’s biggest workplace priorities: work-life balance.
In a commentary published by Fortune, Barr argues that balance is effectively a luxury young entrepreneurs should postpone. His strategy is simple: sacrifice aggressively in your 20s, when responsibilities are relatively limited, to create enough financial freedom to make different choices later in life.
Barr started college at 17 and says he built a seven-figure social media marketing agency from his dorm room by 18. That business, Step Up Social, later merged with The Candid Network.
His approach, however, involved extreme trade-offs – including sleeping an average of just 3.5 hours a night.
Barr Says He Sacrificed Sleep and Family Time
Barr says he turned down an internship paying about $5,000 per month because he believed investing the same hours into his own company offered substantially greater long-term upside.
His social life was similarly restricted. Barr says he went out only twice during college and skipped family holidays for three years while concentrating on his businesses.
The most extreme sacrifice was sleep.
Barr says he averaged 3.5 hours per night to create more time for his companies and acknowledged that the schedule damaged his health in the short term. Despite those consequences, he wrote that he would make the same decision again.
Financial independence, in his view, was worth the temporary sacrifices. Barr contrasts his earlier financial constraints with his current lifestyle, saying that a $500 restaurant bill now barely registers relative to his net worth.
His philosophy is essentially to say “no” to almost everything today in exchange for the ability to say “yes” later.
A Radical Approach to Building Wealth
Barr’s argument is based on the idea of compounding – not only of money, but also of time and effort.
Someone in their early 20s may have fewer financial and family obligations than they will later in life. Barr believes concentrating an unusually large amount of effort during that period can create businesses, equity and wealth that continue generating value decades later.
That approach differs sharply from conventional personal-finance advice, which typically emphasizes sustainable saving, investing and career development rather than extreme working hours.
It is also important to distinguish Barr’s personal experience from a broadly applicable formula for financial success. His account is an opinion piece describing the choices he believes worked for him, rather than evidence that severe sleep deprivation or abandoning work-life balance reliably produces wealth.
Gen Z Is Divided Over Ambition and Burnout
Barr’s argument also points to a broader contradiction among younger workers.
Gen Z employees continue to show significant professional ambition, but younger workers increasingly place greater importance on mental health, purpose and work-life balance when defining career success. Deloitte’s research similarly finds that Gen Z and millennials are reconsidering traditional definitions of professional advancement and remain concerned about chronic workplace stress and burnout.
Barr sees that caution differently.
He argues that young people who want exceptional financial outcomes should accept that those results may require unusually large sacrifices, particularly when building a company from scratch.
The philosophy has clearly worked according to Barr’s own account. But his experience also illustrates the trade-off at the center of the debate: maximizing time spent building wealth can come at the expense of health, relationships and experiences that cannot necessarily be recovered later.
For young investors and entrepreneurs, the more useful lesson may therefore be less about copying Barr’s 3.5-hour sleep schedule and more about understanding opportunity cost – deciding deliberately what to sacrifice today, what should remain non-negotiable, and what kind of future those choices are intended to finance.
