I was reading the beginning of the History of Clojure (a language that I have no time to invest in learning, but still interesting to me):

I started working on Clojure in 2005, during a sabbatical I funded out of retirement savings. The purpose of the sabbatical was to give myself the opportunity to work on whatever I found interesting, without regard to outcome, commercial viability or the opinions of others. One might say these are prerequisites for working on Lisps or functional languages.

If you want to make any dent in the world, you either make it at a personal cost (not always monetary), or with other people’s money. Savings I have none. Self realizations are evident.