- Steve Antonioni saved $90,000 in four years, enough to quit his job and pursue YouTube.
- He took a temporary pay cut but says he now earns more from YouTube than he did from his 9-to-5.
- He maintains a simple lifestyle, which allows him to save and invest the majority of his income.
Steve Antonioni has never been interested in “the traditional sequence of life,” he told Insider. “Going to school, starting work, buying a house, getting married, having kids — I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied by that path.”
He was sure of that as early as high school, but as a teenager, “I didn’t know how to break out of it. I didn’t know if that was actually realistic or what the strategy would be to do it.”
Antonioni grew up in a small, blue-collar mining town outside of Sudbury, Ontario, where he says he wasn’t exposed to a variety of ideas or encouraged to think entrepreneurially. It wasn’t until he went to university in Ontario that he started to formulate what an alternative path could look like.
He made some like-minded friends and they would explore the idea of escaping the rat race by reading books like “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss. “That’s when we realized that there are people living outside of the box,” he said.