It's always a mix of luck and persistence. People always assume luck means something with the probability of a lottery win. I don't have a spouse, I payed for

It's always a mix of luck and persistence. People always assume luck means something with the probability of a lottery win. I don't have a spouse, I payed for everything myself, but there was still much luck involved. Just not one in a billion kind of luck. I'm living in a shared flat, so I don't pay much rent, which allowed me to save more of my income, and the low rent allowed me to live much longer from those savings later. I could have gone 2-3 years without a job, simply because my costs of living were so low. That opened me up to much experimenting with jobs and also enabled me to turn down many bad jobs. Having low costs of living is luck, but you can have that much easier than you think. The odds are quite in favor of a freelancing developer. I focused on projects that went 3-6 months. This meant, I only needed to be lucky to get one or two projects a year. Again, you have to be lucky in some kind of way to get one of those projects, but if you write like 10 applications a month, and you only have to be lucky in 1 of those 120 applications a year, you're good to go.