Passive Income Will Replace Your 9-5 Job
You can follow this simple formula.
A job can be a distraction from what you really want to be doing.
I’d sit in meetings when I had a job and daydream about writing. I couldn’t wait to get home and write a tweet or connect with others writers.
Only my leftover time got given to my passion for writing. Every other minute was spent running from one meeting to the next, while time flew by. It made me depressed at times. To my friends and family I could often be cranky.
The crankiness came from the frustration of not being able to sit down and write. I always had a time limit, which screwed with the quality of my work. I couldn’t fall down the rabbit hole of a topic and then come up for air 8 hours later. All my work always had 1-2 hour time constraints.
A time constraint helped me get work done. But the quality of work never quite became exceptional. I’d try to revisit work I’d already started later on, but the thrill of the moment and the excitement for the topic had vanished.
The best time to act on an idea is when it inspires you in the moment.
Always coming back to your best ideas that light you up with passion, because you’ve got a pain-in-the-ass job in the way, is no way to live.
Don't waste your days working on one thing but always thinking about another.
–@mysuccesstheory
The truth about quitting a job
I have 100+ close connections who have all quit their jobs to create content, or become investors, or play in crypto, or become professional gamers, or run a small business.
All of them told me some version of “it started with passive income.”
A job is required to pay bills. Regular money coming in builds your confidence and maintains your certainty. The problem is it’s temporary. A job has you by the curly ones. They can change the KPIs and you have to keep jumping and saying “how high, sir?” A job gives you zero control.
You can have the best job in the world … until the people who enable your dream job move on and the incompetent move in to ruin your career party.
I quit my job for control.
I didn’t want monkeys in suits who have never owned businesses to tell me about business. They had no idea about business. They always had a giant logo behind them which automated much of the revenue they thought they were gods for helping to create.
But I didn’t quit my job the same day I learned the truth.
No. I read a tonne of finance books.
Let me tell you what every one of them said:
“Get passive income.”
That’s it. The financial wizards say this over and over. It’s child’s play once the message sinks in.
The question is, how?
Passive income streams that can replace your job
Passive income is money you make while you sleep. You can do the work once and it keeps paying you continuously.
Here are the best side hustles I’ve discovered that anybody can do:
Become a content creator. Write on a platform like Quora or Medium and collect royalties. The barrier to entry is zero.
Start a Twitter account and post short tweets. Once you get to 1000 followers, then sell an eBook on Gumroad about a topic you know about, that’s validated by a tiny audience.
Invest money in stocks. The trick here is to forget about stocks that pay dividends. Why? The value of a dividend stock is discounted by the cost of the dividend they pay you. So a normal stock and a dividend stock have the same value. The other issue with dividends is you pay tax on them. This is unnecessary. You can buy stocks with no dividend that go up in value and then unlock the gains by borrowing money against the stocks to buy whatever you want.
Stake Ethereum to get 8% interest. Ethereum is a crypto. You can buy some of it, then lock it away in the equivalent of a term deposit and earn passive income.
Start a tiny eCommerce business. Use either a website you pay to have optimized for SEO, or sell products via Instagram.
Teach a skill to people who need it. Use Teachable, Skillshare, or Udemy. Build a small email list. Tell the email list once every three months to buy your course.
If you have an internet connection there are platforms to help you earn money.
What it takes is this:
An open mind to see opportunity.
The ability to turn off the stupid skepticism people have about making money online. Oh, and to ignore the haters who are simply jealous of the fact you want to, or already are, earning passive income. Screw em. Haters don’t pay bills.
Time spent doing your chosen side hustle before or after you get home from work.
Use your 9-5 to fund your side hustle and obtain more money-making assets
In the early days my side hustle of writing didn’t make me a dollar.
I used my 9-5 job to pay the bills: phone, internet, web domains, hosting, website theme, etc. With the money I had leftover I invested it into assets.
The three assets that worked well for me were stocks, bitcoin, ethereum.
The biggest thing to understand is that a side hustle will morph into a business. A business is an asset. It’s the best asset you can have.
Why?
Sure, you can make a tonne of money in crypto but you’re not building anything. When you start a business you learn new skills. You experience what it’s like to begin from nothing and build a tiny empire. And you meet cool people along the way as you grow your business.
The challenge with owning a business is it scares people. They think they need a degree or a consultant or a guru. You don’t.
The phrase side hustle allows you to hide what you’re really doing. You can mess around with a side hustle. You can do it outside of work. There’s no expectation.
But a business? There are huge expectations.
As soon as friends or family find out, they’ll forever be asking you “how much money ya making, pal?” No one asks about side hustles. They simply hear it once and then dismiss it. That’s perfect for your growth.
The transition from job to full-time passive income
The challenge is most people never start. Passive income starts slowly. Then it gets bigger over time as it compounds.
People ask me what the qualifications are for passive income. Simple.
Make your first $20 online.
When you think of the process like that, it’s easy to get your head around. If you found a way to make $20 then you can at least do it again. And if you do it repeatedly then you’ll find more ways to grow that income.
Let me explain. I follow a bunch of side hustlers on Twitter. I read about things I already know.
Every once in a while I stumble across a new way to make passive income from one of these Twitter folks that I’d never heard of before. Once you start earning passive income you literally fall over ways to make money.
More than one
One source of passive income probably isn’t enough. One of my main sources in the early days began to dry up. If I’d bet the farm on that way to earn money then I’d already be back at my job scratching my boss’s hairy gorilla back.
Three sources of passive income before quitting a job is my rule.
Time in the game is the differentiator
None of this happens overnight. I’ve seen people do it in a year. I’ve seen people do it in 5 years.
The crazy thing is the time it takes doesn’t matter so much looking back. What matters is you’re having the time of your life while you figure out the passive income game and go deeper on a side hustle you happily do for free outside of your job.
Takeaway
Look out for this sign:
If you spend your day at a job thinking about a side hustle and wishing to be somewhere else, then that’s the universe telling you what you need to do.
Use your job to buy assets and fund your side hustle. Make your first $20 of passive income. Create three passive income streams that equal your current salary at your job. Then quit your job. That’s the formula to replace your job with passive income.
(This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.)
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