Ha! I honestly cannot even fathom how it didn’t occur to you...I think I’ve spent my entire life working with that goal in the back of my head.
Truthfully, I was mostly enjoying my job till about the middle of last year. I work in Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing (I have a PhD in computer science). This is what I've wanted to work on since I was a teenager - having read Robert Heinlein's masterpiece The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Unfortunately, I have been forced to take on some infrastructure maintenance work since we just don't have anyone else to do it. I ought not to complain - my company is paying me very well for this work but it is boring.
I could move to another company but then I would have to get used to it's politics and figure out how to navigate it's minefields. I'm done with working for megacorps.
I want to wake up every morning and do whatever I want. Thanks to the revolution in cloud computing, I can easily continue to work in my field as an independent researcher. With the click of a mouse, I can rent all the computing power I need for a small amount. Also, tons of free data is available.
I plan to start participating in Kaggle contests among other things. I can't do this as an employee for intellectual property reasons. I face all kinds of constraints of this nature.