Wifey & I were doing our dead-end McJobs, like normal people do. But I was playing with my old-car hobby just about every day. My cars started getting noticed because they actually worked well, instead of just looking nice. People started paying me to make their old junk work better than new. Every weekend & most evenings was full of working on stuff for other people. Then I was calling in sick & using vacation time to do what had turned into a healthy side gig. Finally, there was no more vacation time and a choice had to be made. Either go the dead -end McJob on Monday, or stay in my workshop doing something that I really enjoyed.
I left the Mcjob is 1996 and never looked back. The first few years were occasionally tough because there were lulls in business, but now it is a never-ending stream of work. I just pick the most interesting and/or lucrative projects and tell the others "Sorry, we're all booked up for the foreseeable future. Check back with me in a year or so."
My wife got laid off from her McJob shortly after I quit, which was also tough financially, but she found a part-time job and we managed to squeak by. This was way before MMM or ERE, but we had read a little book called "Your money or your life", and realized that if we minimized expenses, we would not need nearly the income that we thought was needed for a 'normal' high consumption lifestyle, plus we'd get to be home and do more fun stuff together. In retrospect, my only regret is that we took the idea of minimizing income to meet minimized expenses to a linear conclusion. If we had reduced expenses by 60%, but reduced income by only 30%, we'd have a higher net worth and be that much closer to true FI. On the plus side, we haven't exactly been "working hard for the man" for the past 20 years.
Dunno if that's what you're looking for, but that's (a small part of) my story.
