Don’t bet your rent on the dream. Bet your evenings.

The risk is worth taking and the size of the bet is what to control. Staking your rent on something unproven turns every ordinary setback into an emergency, which is precisely when people make bad decisions and abandon good ideas. Staking your evenings costs you comfort and leaves the floor intact. A dream does not get better odds because you made it urgent.

So keep the dull income and run the thing alongside it for longer than feels heroic. Give it fixed hours, four nights a week if you can manage that. Go further in when the evidence says to, not when the story sounds better.