This is how many people think. And our thinking determines the opportunities and success we will have in life.
There is so much bad advice on passive income. As someone who has mastered this area of life, let me upgrade how you think about it. (Expect some big wisdom bombs that go beyond the cliche advice.)
Here’s why passive income may not currently work for you.
“Earning passive income is a lot of work”
This critique of passive income shows up a lot online.
No sh*t it’s hard. Everything in life worth achieving is hard. I’ve got a 4 week old baby on my lap as I write this. She’s bloody hard work. Doesn’t mean I’m going to drown her though and write a hater article about it.
If you expect passive income to be easy then you probably don’t deserve to have it.
Passive income requires active hard work to set up.
Learning from amateurs
Everyone is an expert on the internet. And that’s half the problem.
When a wannabe passive income expert says “it doesn’t work” what they should tattoo on their forehead is “I haven’t figured it out yet and I’m angry at the world because I haven’t.”
They try. Or they give up. Or they’re impatient with passive income. Or they criticize passive income to get clicks that earn them passive income — now that’s entrepreneurship baby!
Stop learning about passive income from idiots who’ve never earned it.
If you learn from a moron you become a moron.
It’s the same reason people hate Elon and his tweet platform. “Everything is so toxic here and my feed is garbage.” Follow idiots and you’ll have to consume idiot-made content. This is how life works.
Vet teachers. Look for social proof.
“Real estate passive income doesn’t even pay my mortgage!”
One of the most popular forms of passive income comes from buying a house and renting it out to a tenant.
Spruikers and gurus love to promote this form of wealth-building. But haters of passive income are annoyed with it.
Here’s the thing haters: real estate may not make money for you but it creates many of the millionaires around the world. Let me break it down.
Not all real estate is equal.
If you buy a sh*t property you make sh*t passive income or even go broke. If you take on too much debt and a bat virus locks the world down then, yes, you’re at risk of losing your little property empire.
If you forget the cliche location location location and buy a house in a bad postcode or on a corner, roundabout, or next to a brothel … guess what … you will lose money.
What’s missing?
To make money in real estate you actually have to know what the heck you’re doing. If you just purchase any random house and think you’re gonna buy a Lambo in 2 years then you won’t make a profit on your investment.
Same goes with investing in stocks. If you invest in bad companies then stocks will be a bad investment. Makes sense.
Let me give you another example…
Recently I went to buy a house for my newborn daughter.
I inspected it. My wife inspected it. We inspected it three more times. I took my builder along with me. My dad who’s a tradie had a look too. We decided it was a good buy.
Sooooo…….. I paid $560 to get a formal building inspection.
There were lots of problems — leaky roof, mold in the basement, floorboards that had to get replaced. So I made an offer to the property owner that facted in these defects.
The real estate agent told me no one else got a building inspection. In the last year of looking at homes I’ve been told this over and over.
People buy houses as a passive income investment and then stupidly don’t get a building inspection. Then they say “well, my property costs a fortune to maintain.”
Again, lack of research. Amateurs.
Real estate makes passive income if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise millionaires probably wouldn’t exist.
eBook passive income
I’m an online writer.
I’ve made decent passive income from this pursuit for many years. Over 100 writers in my private community also have this passive income source.
But I often get told in replies to my tweets that eBook passive income is a scam. Jeff Bezos is an evil alien who’ll gobble up all your money and spit it back out at his bikini babe girlfriends.
No. You don’t just write a book and put it on Amazon then call it a scam. The book has to actually be good.
You have to solve a real problem which means you’ve got to, you know, do some research and ask potential readers questions.
And most successful writers who launch good eBook start as bloggers first. They build a small audience to validate their ideas. They have a content library that provides social proof and gives them an indication what ideas to write about.
These passive income writers then publish their eBook in multiple places. They might buy some ads to promote it.
- They ask other writers to share it in their newsletter.
- They promote the book in their own newsletter.
- They write tweet threads about the book then send people to a page where they can buy it.
Books have made passive income for centuries. They’ll do so for centuries more.
You could be drowning in skepticism
Passive income looks like a sales pitch.
You sit on the beach and work a 4-hour workweek, right? When something feels gimmicky or has a bad brand we assume it’s a scam.
Anything that makes you money while you sleep sounds too good to be true. The thing is, it is true if you put in the work and learn the game.
And if you’re patient.
Those who are always skeptical never make money online. It all sounds like nonsense. So they go back to a job that exploits their time and labor and get taken advantage of until they’re 65 and can retire.
Then they retire, learn the pension system is a scam, survive on hardly any money, and live out their last ten years before their funeral in misery.
That life ladies and gentlemen is the real scam. And that’s what the skepticism virus buys you at the enormous on-sale price of $0, if you’d like to purchase it today on discount.
Otherwise you can work a job, have some optimism, and build passive income streams on the side. Choice is yours.
The bottom line with passive income
Passive income isn’t easy. You have to put in the work. You have to do the research. You have to not act stupid. You have to stop looking for shortcuts and applying lottery thinking to life.
Otherwise …. yes … passive income won’t work.
