allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, bett

allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come." Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now, unless I goofed up while fiddling with nginx. Before that I was a contractor for a year or two. After seeing contracting colleagues disappear for months-long vacations, I wanted in on that. Before that I was a regular employee in Europe, where work culture is far more relaxed. I had more vacation days as an intern than my parents in the home country ever had. I also became really good at aggressively cutting meetings for me and my team, which gave us more time to experiment without affecting output. In Germany, you also have the right to reduce your work hours. Coincidentally, that's the article I'm currently working on. There's a minimum number of frogs that you have to eat. Mine is very low out of sheer luck. However there are different ways to bring most people's number down, starting with don't glorify eating frogs.