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The Paradox of Passive Income

The best ways to become rich quickly are by selling cocaine or peddling “ How to become rich “ courses.

Last week, I was approached by a teenager in the park. Wearing blue pants and a loose-fit coat, he introduced himself as a university graduate.
“ How much do you earn? “ he asked.
“ 20,000 INR/ month “, I replied.
His pause with a silly smile confirmed that he was laughing at my earnings. Latterly, he pitched his network marketing business and a dream to be a millionaire in only six months which I politely declined.

There is a heavy trend of having multiple income streams. Websites are full of quick money junk, YouTubers are selling passive income courses and neighbors hitting on you to join their network marketing business. This increasing trend needs resistance as the lure of being a money machine waste tons of time and energy of people, precisely youngsters.

So, I am here to disrupt the idea of passive income, followed by two rationales - why it’s a con.

  1. Kills Compounding Effect:
    James gets out of his dental college and starts his dental clinic in NYC. After a year of working 15 hours a day, James made it to $20K annually. But during his second year of dentistry, James decided to choose blogging and writing as his source of passive income. James started to give three hours of his busy day - writing lengthy articles and promoting them on different social platforms.
    Reduction in practicing his core skill — dentistry, made him lose patients resulting in revenue losses at the end of the second year.
    On the other hand, if he had gone full into dentistry, he could have made $70K annually just by keeping regular follow-ups with patients & referrals he could have through his pleased patients.

What do you get from it?

A lesson. A wisdom on compounding.

Compounding is underrated. It demands time and effort. You should leverage your core knowledge and expertise on the way to become rich and famous. Instead of going crazy on five projects that will make you $500, focus on building something in your niche that will fetch you $1000 straight.

  1. Nothing is there like Passive:

In my teenage, I used to search for passive income ideas extensively. And the ideas that topped the google search list were :

  • Start a blog
  • Create YouTube videos
  • Build an app
    Now, if you had ever started a blog — you know how hard it is. Buy the domain, host and create the website, publish articles, do SEO, find keywords to rank your blog and much more.

And there is nothing Bible magic that you get viewers exponentially. You need to build links, network with people and promote on forums and social media platforms to earn ten token dollars.

You have to show up daily to outrank your competition by posting on celebrities, bitcoin & regarding your niche.

All this demands hustle — needs mini-sacrifices of choosing not to go to the weekend party, brainstorming actively. It’s an active thing; it’s challenging & exhausting.

The same goes for creating YouTube videos and building an app. There is no shortcut. You need to record-edit and code-iterate for many months to generate the results.

Conclusion:
The passive income idea is a bubble. Earning money by leveraging the internet & technology is easy, but the competition around makes it laborious. You require to invest numbers of hours actively doing something to have a steady supply of wealth. If you have a “ Golden Egg hen ” , you still need to feed and guard it.

Alright Indie-Hackers, upvote it if you liked it.

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