For anyone looking to take the plunge remember you only live once, you deserve to be happy (if you had a situation like me), and it is not nearly as scary as other people say once you make the move. 

If you aren't providing the most value, why do you deserve to live in the best place.

You deserve to enjoy life.

Do not save all of the increase or even all of the increase above cost of living (you deserve some rewards for you hard work), Example if you get a 5% raise at the end of year one and the inflation rate is 2.5% would imply the raise above 2.5% is money beyond your previous year's expenditures.

Many people just want to do a 9-5 and not worry about doing extra work or stress etc. and that's okay too if that makes them happy.What bothers me more is the people who either naturally are weak minded or were raised that way and don't have any passion to succeed and are unhappy because they feel the world isn't giving them what they deserve.

When all was said and done - and after our insurance paid us (exactly what we deserved, verified by a public adjuster we used,) we lost in the neighborhood of $65k in the 1.5 years of owning the property that we had planned to flip in six months...As another indicia of Jekyll’s negligence and a confirmed event of what could easily have cost us more money: Just before bringing on Jekyll’s mother, Jekyll told us that he was going to be able to get a deal on staging, and was going to pay for three months of it himself.

I am not a "police state" guy, but no human deserves to be treated like that doing their job.

Your question deserves an in depth answer because it's one of the better ones.The first thing you need to is compartmentalize what you can do, meaning what are your resources and how can they be best deployed. 

It’s my hope to catch the attention of a bigger buyer/builder and light a flame of for my town, it deserves it.

@David Zheng Congratulations David, well deserved.