Finance

Entrepreneurship has made Stephan Aarstol a successful man in ways that have little to do with numbers on a balance sheet. True, he grew his company, Tower Paddle Boards, from $3,000 in revenue in 2010 to around $5 million in 2014. But if you ask him to describe what he values most about the experience, he's likely to use words such as "freedom" and "possibility." Freedom, as in the ability to work according to his own rules—a process he describes in his book  The Five-Hour Workday . Compressing the usual 9 to 5 into a few intense, productive hours for himself and employees has left Aarstol the time to fulfill other important goals, such as attending every one of his son's baseball games. Possibility, as in pursuing a vision, taking risks and building something out of nothing. "Growing a business," he says simply, "is a great experience." Those are the sort of financial lessons he learned watching his optometrist father build a su...