When starting out, a huge mistake we make is thinking our work is all about the money, that if you can earn a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time, that somehow that evaluated you as a person. After gaining a little bit of experience I realised that instead of focusing on how much money you can earn in an hour, you should focus on how much you can increase the value created in that same amount of time.

What this means is, instead of trying to earn as much as you can, focus on building your skills so that in the future you can earn even more. This can take form in many ways, such as investing in up-skilling, or even just focusing on accuracy with the expectation that your speed will increase, therefore increasing your productivity overall. This should go some way towards making sure your job in the future is more valuable monetarily or otherwise than your current one, if you want a job that is.

One other, and in terms of personal finance much more important, way of looking at this is, how can you increase the amount of money you make when you sleep? That's the only way to ever get out of the rat race and to ever truly have the freedom to choose what you want to do. If done, and done well, this is one way to create value that takes the equation of your productivity per hour completely out of question by mooting it completely. Then, you can focus on doing what you're doing because you actually want to do it, not because you're getting paid to do it. That to me is proper freedom.