Making Money While You Sleep

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably heard the "go to school, learn all you can, get a good education, find a good job, work hard, make lots of money" story. It’s good advice. It’s also very dangerous advice. It’s dangerous, because it’s incomplete.

What this story tells you is important, but what’s more important is what this story doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t tell you how to know what is worth learning and what is not. It doesn’t tell you what makes a good education. It doesn’t tell you what makes a good job (hint: it’s not the really salary). It doesn’t tell you how to know what is worth working hard for and what is not. And it doesn’t really tell you where the "lots of money" is going to come from.

All of these things are interesting and all of them are important. What it comes down to is prioritizing. Unfortunately, we live in a world of scarcity - time is limited, resources are limited, skills are limited. But things to learn are unlimited. Things to work on are unlimited. Tasks, chores, activities, travel destinations, books, ideas, causes - all unlimited. Trying to do everything will lead to achieving nothing. This is why prioritizing is one of the most important skills that everyone in this world needs to learn.

This post would be the size of a small book, if I tried to explore all the areas that I’ve mentioned here - we might get into them in later posts. But today I want to talk to you about what I think is worth working hard for.

Doing something just to make money, I think, is a terrible idea. Not that I have a problem with making money - I don’t. But if your only motivation is money, you’ll have no reason to persist - you’ll lose interest, you won’t have a reason to cross barriers, and you will lack motivation to stick through the dip. And because of that, you will lose to those people, who have other reasons beside money to do those things.

On the other hand, things that you’re passionate about are worth working hard for. Things that matter to you are worth working hard for. But that is not enough - you want to do things, that allow you to leverage your time and resources. There are infinite ways of achieving the same goals - what you need to do, is select those that allow you to do more with less. You want to achieve the most results, with the least inputs - help the most people with the least work, do the most work with the least time, make the most products with the least cost, and make the most money with the least resources.

You want to choose those activities that are liberating and enabling in terms of achieving your goals, and not limiting. I want to explain the difference between active (do work - get paid; buy - sell) and passive (build once, sell many) income. Active income is limiting. If you do the work, you get paid; if you don’t do the work, you don’t get paid. If you sell your car, you only get money once. And now you don’t have a car. It is also dangerous. If you work hard to earn active income, you are in trouble every time you need to stop working.

Passive income, on the other hand, is liberating. You don’t need to constantly work on something to in order for it to make you money. It’s scalable - you work hard to create a passive income stream, and then move on to the next. Build one per month, and if you do it for a year, you’ve got yourself 12 different income streams, that don’t need you working on them all the time - which leaves you free to do things that matter to you. It’s also safer, because you can have several sources of income - if one dies, you still have others. But if your only source of income is your day job, and you get fired - you’re toast.

The obvious example of passive income is rent - if you buy a house, and rent it out, you have money coming in every month with little or no work from you. Real-estate is of course a very expensive pleasure, but there are other options out there, that have no risk and will cost you nothing but the time you put into them:

• Publish a book (this one is probably not a good way to start)
• Write a series of short how-to e-books and sell them for a $1 each - there’s very little maintenance needed for that
• Sell stock photography - I’ve mentioned iStockPhoto last time
• Write an article and post it on eHow
• Make a short video clip - revver has a good revenue sharing system
• Make a DVD (which is really nothing more than a longer video clip) and have Amazon publish it on-demand for you
• Build a website about some topic and put AdSense ads on it
• Create a Squidoo lens and link to products on eBay that are related to the topic

I can hear you now: "But Tony, I can’t do that - I’ve got nothing special to show. What would I write about?" I’m willing to bet you, that there are at least 5 things that you know, that a lot of people don’t. In fact, if you take a couple of days and take careful notes about the things that you do, things that you see, things that you read, things that you think and talk about - you’ll have found tons of topics, that you are knowledgeable about; the only thing that remains, is select those topics that you care enough about to create good content for.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to do any of those things, there is no cost, no risk involved - worst case scenario, you’ll have taught somebody something. It won’t make you rich overnight (to put it lightly), but there is no way you can lose with this. There really is no excuse for not doing those things. That is why I want you to go out there, and do them. Today. You can make a video clip in 15-30 minutes. You can write an article in an hour or two. A couple more hours and you’ve got yourself a squidoo lens. An then I want you to come back, and leave a comment below to let me know how it went.

I really appreciate that you keep coming back to my site, it's loyal people like you that make what I do worth it. If you have any questions feel free to email me at Tony [at] BeginWorkingOnline [dot] com. If you like what you read, and find it helpful, make sure to share it with a friend - they'll love you for it! Remember, this blog is not about me, it's about you - so participate in the discussion, let me and the other readers know what you think and how you're doing.