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. A $100 night out was real money against what I had then, but now I don’t even register a $500 restaurant bill that’s less than 0.002% of my net worth. 

To the concern of my girlfriend, I rejected sleep almost entirely. But by averaging 3.5 hours a night, I was able to spend more time growing my businesses. It messed up my health in the short-term, but I would gladly do it all over again today. 

Most people treat “no” as a feeling, but I prefer to run the actual numbers. Skipping three years of family holidays cost me almost nothing against being able to fully cover a parent’s medical care later without blinking — a trade that bought both more time with the people I love and a far higher quality of it.

Quality is important to me. I want the top 1% of experiences, on my own and with the people who matter to me: a stake in a Formula 1 team, not a ticket to watch one; the best hotel in the world, not a Marriott or a youth hostel. 

A mentor once told me to aim for a $100 million outcome instead of a $1 million one, since hitting 10% of the bigger number beats fully hitting the small one. The same logic applies on the way in: the road to the top 1% runs through saying no to the mediocre version first.

Everyone wants the destination. Nobody wants the path.

Gen Z is being handed two instructions at once: reject traditional employment and build something of your own, but also protect your peace and “quiet-quit” whatever drains you. 

Those are opposite paths: one trades comfort for ownership, the other doesn’t leave room for ownership at all.

94% of Gen Z are so afraid of burnout that they forgo leadershipcompletely as a top career goal,  yet 76% of us still say we want to be executives eventually and 43% of Gen Z plan to start a business this year. Read that twice: the majority of my generation wants the title and the power, just not the grind it’s always taken to earn either one. You can’t want the destination that badly and refuse every path that leads there.

Plus, there’s no alpha in conformity. If you’re doing what everyone else in your graduating class is doing, it’s hard to end up with an outlier result. Schools and mainstream media preach balance because it’s the safe, defensible advice to give a room of 20-year-olds, but it’s also why economic inequality keeps concentrating. 

Balance protects the floor you’re already standing on, but it can never build you a new one.

Comfort is the real risk

With AI already reshaping which roles even exist, the twenty-somethings still optimizing for a comfortable middle are optimizing for a floor that may not hold much longer anyway.

Building a business no algorithm can fire you from is the only real job security left, and my generation can’t afford to ignore what that costs. You don’t get equity, leverage, or a business that outlives a layoff notice by staying comfortable, but by sacrificing what’s comfortable to protect what matters.

That means treating your capacity like capital: spend it where it compounds, and cut whatever quietly drains it. Showing up sharp for the meetings that actually move the needle takes real capacity, which is why I’ve cut out anything that drains it: a driver for anything over 30 minutes, a private chef who builds meals for energy instead of an afternoon crash, even training myself out of getting carsick so a routine drive doesn’t cost me a working hour. It sounds excessive until I run the math on what an hour of my best thinking is worth, and then it’s the easiest choice in the world. 

However you spend your youth, you’re deciding which version of your life you’ll be negotiating with at 40: the one you built, or the one you protected.  

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.