I think there were three keys to going from zero experience to making a living as a freelancer:

Make time

Grasp the big picture

Put yourself out there

Let me go through each.

1. Make time

When deep snow piles up, you want to go out and play, right? Build a snowman, dig a kamakura, have a snowball fight. It's the same: when you have room in your schedule, the urge to experiment shows up. Fail once and you can go "okay, let me try it this way" — trial and error. Like a kid rolling around in the snow. You get to fail. Wasted time matters. Heck, curling up under a kotatsu is fine too, lol.

I'd dabbled in programming in the gaps of my old job, but it never came together. When you fail once in the cracks of a day job, there's no "next try."

So I became unemployed. Did I immediately throw myself into programming because I had time? Not really, lol. For a while I watched Netflix and went for walks.…