I go back to being 16, when I had to borrow money for three days of internet, find freelance work in that time, do it, and pay the debt back at once. That was the first money I earned from programming.
Someone needed a parser of some kind, and I only knew the basics, but I tried hard and built it (back then nobody even thought of protecting against scraping, so the task turned out to be a simple one). Then I got paid on WebMoney, and I even had more left than the internet had cost. It was an unforgettable experience.
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What came before that? I was an ordinary guy who made websites for himself, and even for people he knew.
My first was a The Sims site where I posted the objects, wallpapers, and floors I had drawn. The game pulled me in because you could walk onto an empty lot with a balance of zero, invent something, and end up with a beautiful palace that was interesting to furnish. I dropped the in-game job pretty quickly, because the pay obviously wasn't enough for anything. So my favorite thing became carving garden gnomes
It is a wonderful thing that, while other people go to work, you are learning something, inventing something, and it brings scalable income for a minimal amount of time. That mindset shaped my life in many ways.