With just over six months since FIRE, I find myself working as hard as ever (without pay), and looking for more. Just the knowledge that I can quit at any time and move on to something else is a huge motivation.
Examples? :)
I've been doing 2 or 3 six hour days a week at my volunteering gig in addition to my own home improvement projects and farm chores. My volunteering gig is a non-profit summer (transitioning to year round) camp that I worked at in college. Most of the work is manual farm type labor/repairs similar to what I do around my own farm. Translation: Hard work and plenty of it! I come and go as I please, speak my mind, lend a little experience, enjoy the socialization, but best of all, I never do the same thing two days in a row which somehow motivates me to work that much harder.
In High School, we had an A/B schedule and in college, I set all my classes for Tues and Thurs, then worked on Mon, Wed, and Friday. It's almost like relief from the task at hand is always just a day away, so why not give it your all? Combine that with the actual ability to walk away from it all and go fishing or hunting if I choose and it's the perfect recipe for one highly motivated individual. Makes me wonder if I had asked for something similar in my working career what would have happened. Might have worked, but might not have, given the rigidity of megacorp. If anyone was perceived as getting a better deal, animosity quickly followed, thus any "special arrangements" were very short lived. Might have been able to find something more up my alley in a smaller company, but I elected to just stick it out. Oh well, water under the bridge and all that...
