The Journey From $2.27 Per Hour to 7 Figures Nothing motivates your hustle like living on minimum wage.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Daniel DiPiazza's new book, Rich20Something: Ditch Your Average Job, Start an Epic Business, and Score the Life You Want

I can remember very clearly the precise moment my mind underwent "the shift."

It was 2011. I was in the back of the kitchen at Longhorn Steakhouse in Atlanta, scooping little clumps of butter into those round plastic containers so that people would have something fatty to slather all over their massive basket of ciabatta bread. Mmm, delicious!

Good ol' LongHorn — tacky as ever

My manager, Scott, walked up behind me and peered over my shoulder.

"Do it again. Those balls look like shit."

"Balls?" I said, looking down at my pants to make sure I wasn't exposed.

"Those butter balls. Re-scoop them. They look like they were scooped by some kid on the short bus. You're wasting .007 micrograms of butter per day with those uneven portions. That's probably costing us $50.00 per year. Do you want to give me $50.00?"

What I wanted to give him was 500 punches right in the face.

In reality though, that type of nitpicking by management happened every day. It was nothing special. But that day…something very different happened in my brain. A light went on (or perhaps several lights…) and a very strong voice filled my head with a potent question:

"Why are you wasting your potential at this job that means nothing to you, around these people who don't inspire you?"

And for the first time in my life, I was speechless…I couldn't even answer myself. I knew I had to get out -- and from that day forward, I became literally obsessed with figuring out this whole "making money" thing.

Why did some people struggle their entire lives just to make ends meet, while others got to live carte blanche with enough money and resources to do whatever they wanted? Was their really a correlation between formal education and success, as I'd been told my entire life? Or was their some other "X-factor" at play?

These are the things I wanted to know desperately -- and I set out to find the answers, even if it meant making an embarrassing failure of myself. After all, I'd already scooped butter balls for a living. It's all up from there, right?

Fast forward just a few years, and I'd gone from working at a restaurant making $2.17/hour (plus tips…) to launching one…then two…then three successful businesses and scaling them all to $100k+ with no startup capital. A few years after that, I took my skills online and made my first million by starting Rich20Something and teaching young people how to escape the 9-5 trap.

How did I do it? Did I come up with the next Google or get a loan from a rich uncle? Hell no. I simply learned how to take skills I already had and create products and services that people would pay me money for. But it gets even better.

As my first few freelance businesses grew, I decided to write a series of articles and open letters detailing my experiences and frustrations with the 9-to-5 struggle. I wanted to do work that made me feel alive. I was sick of working long hours for robotic bosses who saw me as a cog in the wheel. And for f*ck sake, I wanted to get paid! Not because I felt entitled, but because it's hard to make a decent living that can even afford you the basics in life...let alone the big dreamy stuff like building amazing businesses that make huge impacts, or having the freedom to travel around the world on your own dime with zero concern, or having a family.

Turns out that lots of people around the world felt the same way. Thousands of shares and comments started to pour in. I even accidentally broke the internet one time. Oops. (More on that at another time!)

What stood out to me most was how readers said that they'd been struggling with the exact same things -- suffering in silence, thinking they were alone. Maybe you're one of these people?

• College students and recent graduates who didn't know what they wanted...but know the "traditional" career path isn't for them.

• Employees in corporate careers or office jobs that didn't inspire them, who desperately wanted to leave their 9-to-5 gigs and live their dreams on their own terms, but who didn't have a friggen clue of how or where to get started.

• Good, smart people who were overstressed, overworked and underpaid -- and looking for a path to personal and financial freedom.

If that describes you, then I have something for you that could change everything.

It's called: Rich20Something: Ditch Your Average Job, Start an Epic Business, and Score the Life You Want. It's my debut book and I know it's perfect for you, because I am you.

When I first started my journey into entrepreneurship five years ago, this is the book I wanted to read. Turns out I was destined to write it instead.

The great thing about this book is that I've distilled all the critical parts of figuring out what you want to do with your life, developing your business and leaving the 9-to-5 forever.

(Including the process of scaling your money from 5, to 6, to 7-figures.)

In total, over 300 pages of detailed strategies, crazy anecdotes and larger-than-life personalities -- including case studies from over a dozen wildly successful entrepreneurs who will tell you exactly how they did it.

I know that what I've learned over the past few years about business and life can help you get from where you are to where you want to be.

I've seen it happen in my life, and the lives of thousands of my students in the Rich20Something community.

I hope you'll take your first step and let me show you what's possible.

Grab your copy of the first-edition Rich20Something book today.