One thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some things. Someone told me once that a year of

One thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different projects. I am in consultancy and man have I see some things. Someone told me once that a year of experience as a consultant is worth five as an employee. I kind of laughed it off... then I thought about the time I was responsible for managing eight projects as technical lead or sole technical person. They weren't all equally active, and I'm in hardware so there's always downtime as you're waiting for physical activities to take place, and that's well into the article's burnout zone (this was not sustainable or common practice for me), but... it does help explain why I can charge as much money as I do!