I had several side hustles as a kid. Mowing lawns, selling CDs, selling automotive parts, washing cars, selling bailed hay . . . I was always down for a side hustle. I even worked 12-hour days building houses one summer and earned a cool $125 a week (yes . . . per week). A friend recently asked me what motivated me at such a young age.

The driver was wanting independence. I vividly remember my parents telling me they wouldn’t buy certain things for me. Their reasoning was solid. We weren’t rich. Money didn’t grow on trees. I needed to earn the expensive things I wanted. My parents controlled how money was spent (and rightly so because they worked hard to earn it), which meant my buying decisions depended on what they’d allow.

I hated this dependence. It felt suffocating. I was limited because my funds were limited. I decided to start doing things to earn money and reduce my dependence on my folks. To their credit, when they saw what I was doing and why I was doing it, they encouraged me. They didn’t try to reassert control (even though I was still living under their roof). They told me I could do whatever I wanted with the money I earned, with a few exceptions.

Disliking feeling dependent and doing what I could to break away from it led me to entrepreneurship. The more I learned about entrepreneurship, the more I saw it as the path to a life of independence (and not just financial independence).