10 Ways CM Punk Changed WWE FOREVER
7. He Proved That Wrestlers Don't Need WWE To Be Happy/Successful
For a long time, WWE was the only place for people to go if they wanted to make a living as a professional wrestler. As such, signing with WWE carried with it an immense level of financial pressure. So, if you were a disgruntled WWE wrestler during, say, the early 2000s, your options were to keep your mouth shut and press onward, or to leave and risk major economic hardship.
While some of this mentality still exists today among WWE personnel, it's not quite as prevalent a thought as it used to be. And we can thank CM Punk for that.
After Punk left the company, he made it abundantly clear that money could not buy him happiness in WWE. Since then, we've seen a major uptick in superstars asking to be released from their WWE contracts, such as Cody Rhodes, Luke Harper, and Rusev, and other superstars refusing to sign new contracts at the end of their deals, such as Dean Ambrose and Chris Jericho.
It would seem that the "dream job" facade that WWE built for so long has been broken, and all it took was for one top superstar to say "enough is enough".