When you are creating something, like a business, an invention, or a screenplay, you don’t know the hourly rate you’re working for. It could be negative, it could be higher than any reasonable salary.

Monty didn’t know the hourly rate he was working for when he started creating MySQL in 1995. I guesstimate he spent at least 26,000 hours coding MySQL before he sold it to Sun thirteen years later. That’s over 3,000 work days filled with problem solving, fatigue, doubts, and no guarantees.

On top of that, Monty was giving MySQL away as free open-source software the whole time. He saw the long view. He wasn’t playing for a paycheck at the end of the week. He lived with the risk that events out of his control might mean the long view never even came true.

In 2008 he finally knew the hourly rate. His capital gains from the sale were roughly $26 million dollars. That’s $1,000 an hour. On top of that the software he created became a staple of the Internet software world, used by Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress (including this blog), and more.

If he had approached any software company in 1995 and said “I’d like you to pay me $1,000 an hour to write database software.” would any owner have agreed to that deal? No, he had to be his own owner, take a lot of risk, and show a lot of perseverance to make that deal come true.

When you don’t limit yourself to projects with a known hourly rate, you open up a big world of possibilities.