Serious talk: quitting your job to focus full time on your hustle, what did/does it take for you?

First things first, to be clear, my previous, "I-went-to-school-for-this" office job was practicing law, first criminal defense and then immigration defense. My side hustle, at first at least, was betting on sports. Basically, immigration defense became a total kafkaesque joke when the government stopped following their own rules that they themselves made and interpreted. I had a lot of scattered skills but outside of writing a decent legal brief the only thing I had some serious dedication to was watching sports, especially baseball, and that included watching west coast games while living in New York and Boston for years, averaging out to 150 in the regular season. Also, almost my entire family lives in Nevada, as did the entire family of my partner, a sheer coincidence but it made the "where to next" question a lot easier. I got back to my mom's 3 days before spring training with 2 grand in the bank and a bunch of suits and 2 computers and that was pretty much it. 5 weeks later I had made 18% ROI just from spring training and enough to move out to a place that cost the same as my place in New York but did not share a wall with a subway station or have a slight grade to the floor that resulted in the slow shift of furniture. And this was before I had set up any models or use any analytics - it's no longer relevant today but when only the AL had the DH, bookies always over-valued their impact on offense when generally by the 5th inning no starters were left on the field anyway. This would be obvious to anyone who actually obsessively watched spring training games, but turns out, the bookies weren't, and gradually I found that the bookmakers really were only good at setting the spread and with the help of analytics, it's essentially passive income - and it would be entirely passive if only casinos opened up their APIs. About 5 years have passed and in conjunction with a long but generally ironic association with crypto until suddenly everyone FOMOed I'm in a position to actually give money to the public interest firms I was sending resumes to only a few years ago. Also, it turns out that math and statistics, at least as applied, is not as daunting as high school made it out to be, and without the terrible pedagogy I was able to teach myself a lot of programming and analytics mostly by looking at other people's Github. Sadly, I lost a lot of faith in all of the institutions I worked with, even though always in an adversarial capacity I used to think that I could at least make a difference and now I'll settle for leaving the world with a little dignity left. Also, because I had zero formal training in anything not related to the humanities or law since the 11th grade, I'm never fully convinced that I'm not actually totally crap at what I do now and the results are all random luck. I had imposter syndrome before as well, who knew it never goes away whether you have all the qualifications or none of the qualifications. I'm also not entirely convinced that the world didn't end when David Bowie passed and all that we experience is just what happens when the space-time continuum breaks. so tl;dr: it took the casinos becoming more trustworthy than the government to jump ship, and it took an unhealthy obsession with baseball to enable the whole thing. or blame david bowie.