[icelancer]

Already went through that time. Had 7 years of stagnant growth while I worked full-time as a software developer / data scientist. This is year 9.

I knew this would be my full-time job eventually. My field is very research-based and very niche. It took over 10,000 hours (I guess I'm a Gladwell expert now) of unpaid research and experimentation to get to where I am at.

Was I happy doing it? Tough to say. I know that I wasn't sad when I worked on it, compared to working my "bullshit" data science job.