Omar Zenhom argues that debt costs you more than money: it kills your freedom to take risks and make quick decisions. Entrepreneurs with debt are forced into conservative choices that hamper growth, when real entrepreneurship is pursued for freedom in the first place.
You need to be careful about the advice that you listen to online, that debt is a good thing, that debt is acceptable. Here's the argument that no one ever makes when it comes to this. You know, I never hear this on conference stages. I never hear this on TED Talks. I never hear this anywhere. All right. But debt does not just cost you money. OK, it costs you freedom. And the reason why I got into entrepreneurship in the first place is to have freedom, is to be able to create freely, to be able to produce things out of thin air and do what I want. When you carry significant debt, you you can't take risks that you believe in. And this is really important because business is all about taking small bets. You can't take that bet and spend that money if you have no margin for error, right? It's going to make you very conservative. In business, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to move and make moves as quickly as you think of them, because that's how you compete in the marketplace.
