Strategic Poverty Choice

A story about how Shaan Puri deliberately chose to live on minimal income after college to maximize his time for entrepreneurship.

"When I graduated from college, I decided I was going to spend a year being 'strategically broke.' I chose this phrase instead of saying 'unemployed' or 'traveling' because it got people to ask intelligent questions like 'what does that mean?'

I calculated what I call the 'freedom number' - the minimum salary needed to have maximum freedom. For me, it was roughly $15k to live on for the year. While all my friends were targeting six-figure salaries and willing to work banking jobs 80-90 hours a week, I went the opposite way.

I tutored stats, even though I was a C+ stats student, and taught basketball at a school for autistic children. This only took about 4-5 hours a week of my time, but paid me the $15k I needed. This gave me 80 hours a week free to do whatever I wanted.

We lived really scrappy - our apartment had a towel on the wall for art, an ugly Craigslist couch, air mattresses for beds, and we put three people in a two-bedroom apartment. We didn't spend money on anything because it would decrease our freedom. We used all that time to start our first business, Sabi Sushi, which we ended up pitching on CNN - though it turned out to be a terrible idea."