Fortunately, I leaned this about 2 years into my engineering career and adjusted my thinking. I never had a job where if you worked twice as many hours, you got paid twice as much. So I focused on completing tasks as efficiently as possible, then using the time savings to work on “personal projects”. No doubt the time I spent at work studying the stock market and the principles of “skim” were the most highly compensated hours of my engineering career.
I retired in 1994, the dollar amount of my portfolio gains in 1996 were greater than the sum total of all my wage & salary earnings to date. In 1997, the portfolio return exceeded “the sum total of all my wage & salary earnings to date”, inflation-adjusted. And you wonder why I question the value of work?
Also, never volunteer.
intercst