“Chasing passive income will force you to work harder than you need to,” Tim Denning writes. I would know. I’ve had various forms of passive income over the years.
In 2018, I pre-sold a writing course before I had made it. I made over $20,000 in the span of a few days. For those few days, my inbox looked like the passive income dream. It was just payment after payment trickling in. But actually, behind the scenes, it was the most effort I had ever put into any single project.
I had to draft the whole curriculum and really flesh it out. Build a long, convincing sales page. Write a sequence of many emails to get people to click. Oh, and there were two other pesky requirements: I needed a list of thousands of emails to actually send the sales copy to. Plus, you know, four years of actual writing experience so I had anything to teach at all. The delivery of the project wasn’t any easier. For the next six months, I recorded over 15 hours of video footage. Over 130 individual videos. Then, I had to upload it, make it presentable on the platform, and so on.
Ultimately, there was nothing passive about the whole thing. It was all. Just. Work.
Other forms of passive income turned out to be the same. When Four Minute Books had many posts ranking well on Google, I’d get some people redeem coupons for book summary apps without me even knowing. That was cool—but it was never enough to pay the bills. Plus, it was mostly out of my control. The same applied to having ads on the site in general. It’s great when you have a lot of traffic coming in, but that traffic is never guaranteed. So you’re always laboring to maintain or get more of it, and yet, it can all still disappear over night. In my case, it was more of a slow drain, but sooner or later, AI, algorithms, and Big Tech will get everyone. And I never felt I truly had the time to enjoy my “passive” income.
Again, it was all just work.
The problem with passive income, Tim writes, isn’t the idea of having people pay you while you sleep. It’s the idea of you not working for that money after you wake up. Passive income sells the dream of easy instead of the dream of flexible. Or at least, that’s what most of us decide to hear when we see all the glimmering case studies on the web. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, these people simply work their butts off.
In 2017, I tried to convert the concept of “passive income” into something useful. I called it “return on time.” Rather than obsessing over any one opportunity, consider the lifetime amount of money you’ll make from any given hour of work. Then, work towards a future where that number will slowly climb. When you map out what those futures might be, you’ll quickly realize: There is no easy money. The things that pay off the most in the long run are impossible to value early on. Many of your hours will make zero dollars—until everything comes together and starts adding up all at once. Just like in my writing course example. Remove the audience and skills I had built over four years, and I could have written all the sales copy I wanted. No income. Not passive or otherwise.
Passive income sells the idea that money is hackable. But the only people who hack their way towards money are criminals. Fine, and a handful of legit cybersecurity experts. Still, the idea of a cheat code is alluring. I’ve been there, forever jumping from one scheme to the next, always quitting once things revealed themselves to be more complex than they seemed.
“If you get seduced by it, you’ll likely give up on the idea of hard work and chase an easy version of life that doesn’t exist and lacks meaning,” Tim says. “Instead, choose a form of work that doesn’t feel like work that you like working hard at.” If there ever was a cheat code to life, that would be it. Realizing there are no tricks at all. Only choosing well, making the right tradeoffs, persisting for a long time, and hoping for the best.
There is no easy money. It’s all just work. Have fun!
