Do you want to or do you have to?

A jubilant "Friday" meme made me write this.
For more than 7 years, my work was something which I had to do.
I used to check the time every few minutes as soon as the second half started and wait for the clock to tell me when I could go home. I started counting the days left for the weekend to arrive as soon as the middle of the week was reached. I used to go late (was self employed) on Mondays to ease the pain of a new week of hardship. Eventually, when I had ruined enough of my life's time, at 31 I switched to professionally doing what I always loved to do: coding. If I had known (and I could have if I had bothered to ask) that no professional certification is required to get a job as software developer, I would have saved some years and a lot of agony.

Now, for the last four years, I work everyday, every possible minute I can. I take leaves only when I have dived too deep into a particular subject or tool and do not want to get interrupted with new tasks. I feel privileged to get paid for what I would have always done anyway, every single moment of my life, and I remind myself of this when I am feeling low.
Yes, there are issues at work, will always be the case when you work with people, but I keep my focus on the machine and the results I produce shadow those issues.

I wish everyone had (or created with savings) this opportunity to do what they truly want to, the results produced will cover up all other shortcomings.

Even if you start late in life, you can race ahead of a very large percentage of people because they have to do what they are doing. Your year's worth of effort is far more than theirs and the difference will only increase exponentially with each passing year.