"Heck, starting a software business and decided to grow to your first hires and worrying about making payroll is just as taxing." Actually in my experience it'

"Heck, starting a software business and decided to grow to your first hires and worrying about making payroll is just as taxing." Actually in my experience it's not. Again about 5 years ago I started my own software company. About a year after that I brought in a friend as a partner. We did consulting for the next few years, and my partner ran into an idea for a product that we couldn't pass up. (We're releasing to our first round of beta-customers this week.) During that time we've had several employees (part-time and full-time), great contracts, not-so-great contracts, and one contract that made me curl up in my bed for a week and refuse to speak to anyone for two days. My job has still been significantly easier than my wife's over that same period. I've had to deal with maybe a dozen clients, she's had hundreds in the 3 years she's had a retail location. Our operating budget monthly outside of payroll is measured in the hundreds (handful of linodes, github account) her's is an order of magnitude higher. She has to travel extensively around our metro area (we happen to live somewhere with crap public transit so lots of driving), spending some weeks as much as 30hrs in her car alone. I work from home, or when I'm feeling audacious from the park near my kid's school. Just today she called and told me though that she'd visited a place where part-time employees had to be badged in, and she was incredibly happy to be self-employed seeing that. I've spent the last few days feeling the grass was greener with a salaried job. Knowing your next paycheck is gonna arrive is a really nice luxury. Being able to take two weeks off without having to worry about how you'll make payroll is a really nice luxury. Listing here for you all the reasons why being self-employed sucks has ironically reminded me that I really am doing this because I want to. So yeah what you're saying overall about finding what need to do and doing that is entirely true for me, but it isn't necessarily "easy". I certainly didn't realize how hard it would be before I started.