First place I built, and still my fall back of fallbacks is a 450 square foot cabin in Alaska. No running water. Built that when I was 16-21, started as 128 square feet grew over time. I didn’t know the gift I was giving myself at the time, I just wanted a place to smoke dope and shag. The time I spent pounding nails in those boards has paid dividends of many thousands per hour.

I grew up poor, subsistence fishing, hunting, gardening. Later I understood that was a choice of my father’s. He made good money when he worked, he just preferred to be at home and work with his kids. Reflecting on it, when he needed to buy a new truck, he went to work for a month, bought a 1977 dodge crew cab new off the lot, went back to hunting lol.

I Always had a natural aversion to employment (not to hard work, just working under supervision) , probably a personality disorder I guess. I value the control of my time to an extremely high degree. I’ve been self employed / founder / investor 90 percent or more of my working life.

Ended up raising my first kid at the cabin for a few years. Eventually, in my early 30s, I started to have something you might call a bit of success.

As for how it helped? I’ve never paid rent or a mortgage in my life.(except short term/vacation rentals, hotels, etc, of course) I launched and crashed several businesses from there. Never felt like the end of the world, just the end of the day.