I must confess that I actually plagiarized the title of this post. I haven't done it out of laziness though (maybe just a little bit). I did it because I came across a Ted Talk with the same title on youtube yesterday and I decided that I wanted to write a post about it not just because the title so perfectly conveys some of my thoughts at the moment but because the video itself is so good I wanted to divulge it among my readers and friends. Running at only 15 minutes long, it nevertheless packs a lot of information and is an absolute gem you should check out. Being so brief it doesn't actually go into a lot of detail but it is an excellent concise explanation on why we should be all thinking in terms of passive income. The rest of this essay is an attempt at doing the same thing in a slightly different way and in written form.
Of course if you read the previous 7 posts in this blog you are no longer, unlike most other people, a stranger to the wonders of passive income. You know what passive income is and why it is valuable and if you don't, just go back and reread the previous posts and you soon will. So I won't repeat the things I wrote in those previous posts and I won't bother you with a long explanation of what passive income is. The purpose of this post is rather to, like Alex in his brilliant speech, to delve a bit on what passive income can do for us and how it can change our lives.
It doesn't matter where you live, passive income can change your life. To receive money regardless of having a job or not is akin to financial independence which in turn is akin to real freedom. The truth is that the majority of people in the world are slaves to the demands of money. They are utterly dependent on the financial security their jobs provide them with. Unfortunately though, that security comes at a high price. That price is often renouncing to many of the things in life they truly enjoy.
Passive income allows us to think in a way mostly only children can afford to think in in our world today. What would you do, who would you like to be, if money wasn't an issue? The reason this question probably sounds childish to most people is because they immediately associate adulthood with the many constraints money often places upon the vast majority of adults.
The great thing about the financially educated individual however is that, by educating himself, he can distance himself from that limited way of thinking and embrace other, superior, alternatives. By creating permanent sources of passive income the financially educated individual can subvert the normal rules of society and break the chains that once bound him to society's implacable human chain of production. He is no longer the slave of money but instead makes money his slave. He is transformed from slave into master through financial education and the creation of stable sources of passive income.
As Alex Szepietowski says in his brilliant speech, there are several forms of passive income generation. He mentions options such as network marketing, affiliate marketing, owning a business or setting up a business within Amazon but, just like myself, he ultimately decided that the best single way to generate passive income was to build a portfolio of rental properties. He wasn't wrong since he amassed a considerable amount of wealth in a reasonably short amount of time by investing soundly in rental properties in England, where he is from.
Alex is just one more person that has believed in passive income and acted on that belief and was amply rewarded for it. Many have done this throughout the years, a great many deal of them because at some point they came in touch with one influential book by one influential investor. Yes, you guessed it, I'm talking about Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, a book which, by the way, Alex cites as one of his major inspirations at the end of his Ted Talk. So much success obtained by so many people, in so many places, throughout so many years surely can be no coincidence. In other words, this stuff must work!
In fact, to a great degree the primary goal of this blog is to create a community of people who share this very belief and who are willing to act on it in order to create great prosperity and, above all, great lives for themselves. In this sense, there is no concept more important to such people than the one of passive income and all the opportunities that it can provide us with and the freedom that it can deliver us.
online resources, learn with Alex Szepietowski:
Ted Talk
Interview
Website
