Are You Selling Your Soul to Make a Passive Income?

If you do what you are passionate about you will never have to 'work' another day again.

Life is too short to be unhappy or unsatisfied with any aspect of your life.

I've had trouble with this sometimes, too.

While I know and usually agree with the idea that we should do what we love, sometimes it feels like if I make a living from my favorite things they won't be so enjoyable anymore after a while.

As of right now, I'm kind of in the stage where I'm feeling that if I make a good passive income doing things I like but maybe I'm not passionate about (although I'm passionate about making money..), then I will have the time and the resources to fully enjoy the things I am passionate about.

I'm not an expert, though! I'm in that fresh-out-of-university existential crisis phase. :p

If that's how you feel while doing this then I wouldn't do it. There will be too many people, myself included, that really enjoy this stuff and will spend way more time getting good at it than you will want to invest.

Gotta pay the bills - gotta make some dosh to do it. Better if we like what we do of course.

"Only celebrities sell their soul for passive income"

I don't think you can call it "selling your soul for passive income", I would call it Surviving

Free up your commitments and chase what you really want. Only live once why spend it enslaved to something you feel less about?

My suggestion is to concentrate on what you do best. Why not build a useful software that could help people run their IM business? If it is good, people will buy it and you'll have a steady stream of income coming in every month.

An example is the Incansoft's suite of *bot software. They are small software that full-fill a particular need, such as social bookmarking, article submission, etc.

Just an idea...

Good luck with your endeavors.

Chris

As someone who spent many years doing open-source programming, I strongly recommend you focus on the passive income.

Once you have enough passive income, you can do all the open-source programming you want without blowing through all your money and going broke like I did.

Invest time in what doesn't move you today, and you can do what does move you tomorrow.

The alternative is to do what almost every other young person does: focus on what moves you now, then end up stuck doing what doesn't move you for the rest of your life.

To be honest, I don't get a bigger buzz from anything else other than waking up to a bunch of "You've got money" emails. IM, is great fun and really tests your entrepreneurial abilities.

Sometimes what you are passionate about won't necessarily be profitable.

A great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can be passionate about MANY things...in fact, that adaptability should actually be a bit of an ingrained quality, IMHO. Do research, find a niche that is profitable, and learn to love it.

I spoke to a gentleman a few days ago after seeing his website that sells football jerseys. Interestingly enough, I found out that he hates football. lol....he LOVES making a living online and helping other peoples. THOSE should be the passions. Everything else will fall into place when you put people first.

you should do what you are passionate about, i also think you can do both at the same time if you plan yourself properly.

If that does not work, go for what you like man.

It's a tough one. Personally I'd go for selling your soul and choose the passive income. I don't believe you can love programming that much, surely you have more fun things to do!

You could be travelling, going to the beach, playing the guitar, video games, fishing, jumping out of a aeroplane while your passive income is making you money.

A lot more fun than sitting in a darkroom typing code endlessly hey?

Although everyone is different, but I suspect you'd eventually regret it, get burnt out coding and wish you had "free money" and more free time.

well I say make the passive income, and when you've got it set up, since it IS passive, you can then go on to fulfill your dreams in computer programming while your 'passive' income brings you lotsa cash

Do what you "Love" most! It is in that area you will succeed the most!

Take care,

Bernard St-Pierre
Marketing Consultant
Copywriter/Teacher

I wouldn't phrase it as "selling my soul", but I have made some observations over the years.

We all need to prostitute ourselves in one manner or another to survive. At least, if we aren't extremely happy with all aspects of our work, it feels that way.

The level we feel dissatisfied tends to relate to our goals, whether they are expressed or not. Yes, if we have clearly expressed our goals, it is easier to determine where we are not meeting our own desires, but it happens whether we have "done the work" to detail what we want in our lives.

Far too many people tend to sort of "float" through life, accepting what comes their way. This happens in all walks of life, whether we think we are really directing our lives or not. I've a friend that is a doctor because his mother always wanted a doctor in the family. He went to Med School because it was easier than not. It was a lot of work and the residency wasn't easy either, and he made it. He's a good doctor, but you can tell it's not what he really really wanted (or wants) to do with his life. He won't talk about the path not taken or his dreams so it is hard to figure out what his passion is. Perhaps many of us have done something similar, though not to this level. Allowing ourselves to be put in situations where we may not be passionate about them, but realizing they can pay the bills, we are much happier to do that than what we expect would be the alternative.

I find a huge variety of people in the IM field, and probably as many reasons to be here as there are people, if you could get honest answers. I find that in my life, I've sort of floated from one profession to another as the opportunities were available to me. None were truly my passion, but several got close. I really liked programming as a contributor and as a manager. I loved hardware and software product development and the adrenaline rush of doing something that's not been done before. I've had physical jobs and mental jobs. Where I'm sitting today, I like my day job, but it isn't providing the satisfaction I crave.

I like to write, and find that various aspects of IM fit right into that desire, as well as a drive to teach. I'm bored to tears with the typical classroom approach to teaching, so that wouldn't work at all. I found consulting to be rewarding but there were certain issues with the environment. Web development was great for awhile, until people expected the world for a dollar, and wanted 24x7 response for trivial things...
In short, I've done a lot of things in my life so far. I still couldn't tell you what I want to do when I grow up, but I can list a bunch of things I don't want to be again.

I look at the field of IM and see that one can generate a good passive income, without necessarily selling your soul. Sure, you may have to prostitute your mind for awhile to get things working, but once you get the basics down and figure out how to replicate the processes to scale up, you can pretty much sit back and direct others to do most of the day to day work, which is what passive income is mostly about, at least to me. .

Don't make this an "either-or" type of proposition. If your primary goal right now is passive income, why don't you dedicate yourself to implementing your internet marketing in such a way that it more or less generates passive income after the set up phase, and then go back to doing open-source programming after that?

We all know that there's very little money in open-source programming, so you have to get your priorities straight. Open-source programming and internet marketing are pretty much mutually exclusive, so I really don't see how you could combine these two in a way that would satisfy you. If it is passive income you desire, you have to focus on your internet marketing, even though it may not be something you're terribly passionate about.

If you focus intensively on this for a few months and get things off the ground, you can eventually return to your open source programming after you're satisfied with the level of your passive income.

selling the soul......

hmm, theres a buyers market

Why don't you program something that solves certain problem, create free version of it, and then sell the premium version. That's what they do to create million dollar company.

Marketer like us have problem, another programmer out there have problem, you already got the skill you need to solve their problem somehow. It just matter of implementing it.

And your skill to program, create something out of thin air, just from your brain, is gift and since you love it, you won't need to sell your soul.

Just another opinion from me though...

I think in the end you will never be REALLY good at something
you don't like doing.

Internet marketing is hard work and you have to really
like it if you want to go far in this business.

Well I had the same issue a while back about selling your soul - It really boils down to the value you add. Stay away from what you don't believe in. There IS a niche in your passion for programming and mathematics.

Could you write a blog about solutions? I bet my bottom dollar you could .. could you create an ebook with that info ... I bet you could.

Do what you do best and you'll find that you can still "package it as internet marketing" without selling your soul