What would you do if you had been in a horrific car accident that shattered your arm, then endured 18 months of agonizing physical therapy, finally going home from the hospital with $100,000 in medical bills only to realize you had been working in a business that had gone from boom to bust?

If you’re Chad Mureta, you’d move right past self-pity into a revolutionary new way of thinking and way of life.

As the head of a real estate franchise, Mureta had been working 18-hour days to stay afloat. Then the real estate bubble burst. Rather than come up with another new business where he’d once again be a slave to his work, he borrowed $1,800 and, on a friend’s advice, became an “appreneur”: someone who jumped on the bandwagon of creating apps for smartphones and other mobile devices at low cost, reaping huge profits.

How’d it work out for him? “In just over two years, I created and sold three app companies and made millions. Two months after launching my company, one of my apps averaged $30,000 a month cash flow. In all, I’ve developed more than 40 apps and have had more than 35 million app downloads across the globe.”

The kid did all right for himself. But the point is not that he took a risk that paid off beyond his wildest dreams or that he was a smart businessman who worked hard. In fact, he opens the book by explaining how few hours he works and how he outsources all the technical stuff so he can concentrate on the creative. This has afforded him the luxury of traveling extensively, watching the money roll in while hiking, skydiving, and bungee jumping all over the world.

His friend’s tip reached him at a time when he was open to a new direction. Oh, you can read all about starting your own app business here; the book is full of charts and graphs and lists of steps to take so that you can become a millionaire, too. But the real story for our purposes is the inspiring transformation Mureta underwent during his long recuperation. It started with reading the books of people like Anthony Robbins (Unlimited Power) and Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) and rewiring himself with the conviction that his quality of life was worth much, much more than toiling endless hours without having time to enjoy the money he was making.

You have probably often read about someone’s near-death experience that made him or her come to stark terms with the question, “What is important in this life?” But it is a rare individual whose lightbulb moment stays with him so that he lives a life in sync with his dreams. Mureta has learned to outsource everything in his incredibly lucrative business that pulls on his time, working only a couple of hours a day.

We can’t all become multimillionaires in the appreneur game, but we can all benefit from Chad Mureta’s wakeup call and his simpler recommendations on how to live a motivated, inspired life, such as writing our goals on the bathroom mirror in erasable marker—and believing we will achieve them.

Mureta changed his life for the freedom it gives him, not for the money that continues to roll in. We can all take a cue from him and refuse to be a slave to our work lives and responsibilities. It takes a brave soul to plunge into unknown territory and put things in meaningful priority. Reading App Empire makes you believe you could do it, too.