Trick your mind into thinking you're already retired.

Retirement is part financial independence and part state of mind. What if you could feel like you are retired while still working? Maybe you love your job and get a lot of satisfaction from it from day to day. You wake up in the morning everyday and cannot wait until you get into work.

It's true, this can happen but my experience says it only lasts a year or so. The work becomes mundane and repetitive. You can try to jump puddles by moving to higher and higher positions but in the end of the day, the fact is, you MUST do it. You MUST keep your appointments or you loose your credibility at work. You MUST keep your deadlines, etc. These are the basic responsibilities of an adult. I would have to qualify that as the responsibilities of a typical adult. Everybody has to answer to someone but the typical adult has to answer to others at a typical amount.

I have 10 personal projects I would like to do and they are proceeding at a snails pace. Why? Because I give my day job a priority. It must have the top priority because it is financially the most important unless I want to get fired. I show up to work 8-9 hours a day and this takes priority over working on some random project during the weekday. When I have left over time, I work on the other stuff.

Okay, so what if these side projects ARE the things you work on at work? If that is, you're in a great spot but I'm sure you have other projects that are not work related right? Even if you work on things you love at work, your efforts are being monetized and put back into the company and distributed back to the shareholders in the form of stock appreciation and dividend payouts.

Can you imagine a fictitious company that is large and promises to grow slowly so they are not reinvesting most the the profits? Instead, all the profits are distributed to all the employees evenly? Lets look at Apple (even though they are not growing slowly at all) as an example:

AAPL:
2015 Profits $54 Billion
Employees: 111,000
Profits per employee: $490,000

There you have it. In one year, each employee makes the company half a million dollars. This is the value each employee is contributing to the company and money that should be going to you.

Now, I think it should not be distributed completely evenly since each employee's value contribution will be different. If one employee was the key to a huge financial gain show said person get those profits? It's really hard to measure. If the profits are to be distributed, I think a good starting point would be to distribute it by weighting it to your salary. However, we do know executives might be overcompensated so something in between weighting by salary and HOURS worked might be a very rough starting formula.

This sounds very much like a socialist scheme and it is but we all know this type of thing will never fly. No one would want to buy the stock if all the profits goes to the employees. Instead, sometimes a company may have a profit sharing plan where some of the profits are diverted into payouts for the employee. If you can join such a company that is profitable, then it will be very good for your pocket book. My whole point is that your efforts has value and you are only getting a fraction of it because you traded a majority of it for stability of a paycheck and greatly reduced risk of not starting your own operations.

Even if you enjoy your job, there will be things you do not like to do. Like, some yearly ethics training or fire drills. Being retired is cutting out all crap you hate and fill it with things you like. Being financially independent would still mean doing some things that you do not like but at least those efforts are not consumed by the shareholders.