Don’t Buy the Passive Income Myth: That Course Creator is Lying to You

Scalable income is real. Calling it passive income is misleading.

There is no easy way to make money.

Buying a course about how to make money — especially if it’s a course that tells you how to make a course — is a waste of both your time and your money.

Have you ever noticed how many courses are out there?

They all promise to give you the tools, knowledge, and frameworks you need to make passive income.

Let me tell you a secret: you don’t need to buy a course. If someone is selling you the method they used to make money, there is a high probability that the money they are making comes from people like you.

Don’t fall for it. They are lying.

There is no blueprint. The path that got this course creator to [insert aspirational income claims or other success metric] where they are now is the path that worked for them.

I will say that again.

This is the path that worked for them.

Now they’re selling it to you.

“If they did it, you can do it, too!” Right?

No. That’s not how this works.

If They Made So Much Money, Why Are They Selling a Course?

Serious question. How much of the financial success of whoever it is selling you their SECRET BLUEPRINT TO FINANCIAL FREEDOM came from whatever they were doing before creating and selling a course?

Maybe they truly were successful. But it’s far more profitable to prey on people’s hopes and dreams and fears and insecurities by promising them the secrets to success. Sorry, not just promising.

SELLING the secrets to success.

Don’t buy it. The only path is to carve your own path. You can learn from other people, for sure. But so much of each individual’s success is dependent upon things that can never be replicated.

Their network. Experience. Education. Timing.

Everything is contextual. Being inspired by successful people is good, you can study what they’ve done and reverse-engineer their results. Or try to. There are no guarantees.

Here’s the Thing About Passive Income: It’s a Lot (LOT) of Work

Passive income effectively seems to mean “money that you make in your sleep.” Which people tend to believe is some kind of magic trick where you can just get drunk on the beach all day while your “passive” income funds your mostly-functional alcoholism by paying the bar tab.

That’s not how this works. Passive income is money that you’re making without directly trading hours for a wage of some sort.

In order to achieve this — and it’s very doable — you have to do a bunch of work. You don’t just take a course and suddenly income starts flowing into your bank account.

That would be cool, but what actually happens is you do a bunch of work. You spend hours making a product. Writing a book, creating a course (ha), or hiring freelance writers overseas to create content for an affiliate website that you then monetize.

In all cases, there is work involved. Passive income requires work on the front end. And once your product goes live, it may not even sell.

Your passive income stream is like $50 total, which I’m guessing is substantially less than the amount you paid for the course that taught you how to do this.

Scalable Income vs. Passive Income

Ben Le Fort wrote about this way back in 2020. He said it better than I have and in fact I may have unintentionally plagiarized his title slightly.

(Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Yes. Let’s go with that.)

This is an excellent piece and is the first time I heard someone refer to the concept as scalable income. Much better term than passive income.

His article is also better than this one so here’s the link:

As Ben points out, when someone refers to “passive income,” what they actually mean is “a business with scalable income.”

This is an important distinction.

If you’re trading hours for money, that is not a scalable income.

You run out of hours. You’re only one person. You can only job hop your way to a raise so many times before you hit a limit — either determined by market rates, people get suspicious and don’t hire you after job hop number 12, or some other thing that’s outside your control.

If your income is not directly attached to you, personally, doing a thing each time you earn a dollar, then your income is scalable.

Scalable income means you are not guaranteed to make a dime, but there is no limit on your earning potential. ~ Ben Le Fort

The whole “no limit on your earning potential” is the key here.

Maybe it feels like passive income because you’re making way more than you ever could at a day job.

But it’s not passive. And it’s not guaranteed. That’s okay.

Let’s be honest. There’s also no guarantee that you’re going to have a job tomorrow. Nor can you even be certain the company — or industry — you work for will still exist next year.

Also have you ever been driving to work and kinda sorta hoped you’d get into some kind of car accident?

Maybe not die, but also maybe you’d rather be in the ER than go to work today?

That’s a sign that you might want to reevaluate your life.

This does NOT mean you should buy a course about how to make money online.

Seriously, don’t do it. It’ll just prevent you from actually doing the work that will eventually lead to generating income.

Many people get stuck in this trap.

It’s a form of analysis paralysis. Or like when you invest a bunch of money into some fancy tools or gear for that new hobby you just started.

The courses collect dust. You spend all your time fiddling with the must-have tools instead of doing the thing itself. You run out of energy. Your savings — or parents — can only feed you for so long.

You don’t have to crawling back to the service industry.

There’s another way.

Breaking free of wage slavery is a (worthwhile) tradeoff

Making money on your own terms is both significantly harder (in my experience) and more rewarding than selling your soul to some corporate overlord. They give you a fancy title (maybe) and a pile of busywork.

You’re required to be physically present in an office.

Why?

Because reasons.

They pay you just enough to keep you coming back to the cubicle every day.

Eventually, either by design or by accident, you start working on a side hustle. You start taking your own clients, making and selling art, mowing lawns like a teenager because you’re weird and like mowing lawns.

Then you start to realize that you don’t need a boss or a job

You can make money yourself! People are happy to pay you for your work. Ideally it’s work that you can sell over and over, like a digital product.

Even if not, you can start out selling your hours (consulting, etc) and turn that into an information product.

When you decide to opt out of the 9–5 lifestyle, escape the cubicle farm, and start generating income that does not involve a micromanaging boss you feel…more free.

Happier. More in control.

Which you are! You’re fully in control.

This is awesome.

At first.

Eventually you realize that being in control means you also have to make all the decisions. Do all the things. Your cubicle farm had departments to deal with things like invoicing, payroll, marketing, sales, product development, hiring, taxes.

Stuff you were blissfully unaware was even a thing when you had a narrowly defined role — you were a cog in the machine.

Turns out machines have a lot of moving parts

Some of these parts are way more boring than others.

For you, it might be sales and marketing. For me, it’s anything related to admin or operations or finance or taxes. I’m allergic to administration.

Being in charge means that you have to either do, outsource, or automate everything involved in running a business.

I’ve gotten a bit off track and am talking more about starting a business than earning money as a “creator.” Let’s take a look at how much work one successful writer put in to launching his latest book.

Writing a book is the easy part — now you have to launch it

Since I have yet to write a book, I can say with confidence that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m pretty sure writing a book is a ton of work.

But that’s only the beginning!

Once you’ve finished writing the book, you now have to promote it.

This is more work than you’d expect. It genuinely may be harder and more stressful than phase one of the work, which is doing the writing.

I suspect this is the case, because I helped a friend who was in full-on promo mode for a book he’d recently published with an event. This was a single event on his promotional tour. I’m a pretty high-energy person, but I genuinely don’t know how he’d been doing promo events several times a week for months.

After one event, where I was literally an “Emotional Support Human” and not required to speak on stage, sign books, or do anything other than kind of make sure my author friend had enough books (and food and water) while wandering around collecting free books at the trade show, I was exhausted.

Usually I love events. Lugging around 500 lbs. of books and distributing them is hard. So much harder than I would’ve thought.

Although I’ve dreamed of publishing a book, after this experience I started thinking maybe I should pivot and try to launch some kind of consulting service as a professional Emotional Support Human.

Maybe I will still do that.

Here’s what one successful Medium writer did to launch his book

You’ve probably heard of Ayodeji Awosika.

He has 10M+ views on Medium, 86K followers, and regularly publishes excellent content. Plus he’s published a few books.

In a recent article, he breaks down the work involved in launching his most recent book. As with the event where I was a mere Emotional Support Human, just reading about this makes me tired.

Emphasis added — I bolded each separate project below.

For the launch of my last book, I individually reached out to 100 different creators to help promote it. I wrote individualized articles for each person — no copy and paste. I started sending promotional emails to my list six weeks before the book came out. To entice people to buy it, I created a free online course to give away as a bonus just for buying the book.

I emailed every single one of my friends and colleagues the day it came out. There’s an auto-responder on my email list that promotes the book when each person signs up.

During the launch, I lost an excessive amount of email subscribers because I sent tons of messages, sometimes twice in a single day. The sales of my last book alone are more than what I used to make at my full-time job.

There’s a lot going on here.

Creating an entire course. Outreach emails. Promotional articles. Building an email subscriber list in the first place. All of this on top of writing the book!

There are at least 7 separate projects involved in the book launch.

Being a creator is not for the faint of heart, y’all.

He’s killing it, for sure.

To discover his SECRET BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS, read this.

Please take note that Ayodeji Awosika is making money as an actual creator. He seems to have courses, but he’s not selling them.

The article above lays out exactly what you need to do. How he achieved his success. The roadmap is free. You

All you have to do is the actual work.

A lot of it.

Learn technology + Fail in public + Be Prolific + Promote yourself

If you’re looking for overnight success, you can achieve it. You just need to spend 5–10 years with your head down doing the boring part — actual work.

That’s it. That’s the secret. A bunch of work.

Don’t trust anyone who tells you any different. People who tell you it’s possible to earn money without working are either trying to sell you something, delusional, or both.

Source: Ben Le Fort

Still Not Convinced Passive Income is a Myth?

You either have a trust fund or have mastered the art of magical thinking. Perhaps you’re just really super hopeful.

As much as I hate to destroy your hopes and dreams, I promise that I and everyone else writing about this are trying to burst your bubble only because it’s for your own good.

We believe in you. We want you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

For that to happen, you have to face the sobering reality: it’s not easy.

It’s fun and rewarding and a ton of work.

Hopefully this is enough evidence for you to stop researching passive income streams. Your time would be better spent doing some self-reflection.

Do you really want to do this?

It’s cool if you just want to daydream. Stick with your day job.

You do you.

Just stop looking for a shortcut, a trick, or a hack.

There is no path. There are no shortcuts.

Pick up your machete — whether it’s a keyboard, a paintbrush, a video camera, a microphone, or a pen — and start clearing your path to success.

While you’re at it, enjoy the process.

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