The day before yesterday I sat with Big O cards. Yesterday I looked at the interview calendar and closed it.
Not because I cannot play that game. I can. LeetCode, architecture, a smile on the complexity estimate. After the offer the arithmetic is different: two or three weeks of waiting, probation, three to six months before I start being useful, a year before I think about my own products again.
I am not 25 anymore. I am 37. There is no time for a warmup that long.
A job trades freedom for a salary so you can buy freedom back later. If it does not take, the circle starts over. For the present goal that is too slow.
Why my own things
I am not going to save the planet and I am not flying to Mars. I want what I make to reach a specific person.
Someone downloaded a game and exhaled for an evening after a rotten day at work. Someone opened an app and closed their own hole. Someone read a text and chose the thing they had been dragging for a month.
In a job I am useful and replaceable. Value is measured by process. I am tired of process. I need my own products, even crooked ones, and a till from them, not another forty hours in someone else's system.
Freelance counts the same till another way: hours for money, no office. More clients, more hours. The ceiling is nailed to the week. I build a product once and sell it many times. For now that is a formula, not a fact in the wallet. I need the formula more than another warmup in someone else's team.
Where the money is now
I am not leaving for a monastery. Rent and food have to close this week.
Short freelance as firewood, not as a house. Get the mobile apps to release. Turn the Godot game. See what people take: a sale, a subscription, ads. If the till runs out before income, I roll back to a short contract. If the products do not take, I change the hypothesis. If I sit down myself, I return the walk and the people, not heroics.
"How" lies everywhere: docs, a chat, a person who already did it. Without "why" that is reading instead of a step. With "why" I can take any working method, break it, and take the next.
In a month I will not wake up with a million. In a month there will be launched things, first people, first holes, first refusals. Not "I am preparing for an interview so I can start work in half a year." A bill you can touch.
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