Five Passive Income Skills I Wish I Knew at 20
It’s Tim Denning from Medium and LinkedIn.
Here is my most shared tweet this week:
It all starts with a side hustle.
You need work you can do online & get paid for.
You don’t just flick a switch & quit your job while being financially free.
It’s a process.
The quicker you start the process,
The quicker you can stop wasting time at work, living like a zombie.
Five Passive Income Skills I Wish I Knew at 20
At 20, I spent most of my time thinking with my dick.
Late-nights at nightclubs. Stupid amounts of alcohol. Racing cars down suburban streets at over 100 mph. I asked my friends to call me Peter Pan.
I legitimately told them I would be forever young.
The one or two grey hairs I now have prove this claim to be lame. I wish someone told me at 20 to work on these skills. Then by 30 I would have gotten closer to my ideal life. Instead, I snoozed and loosed.
If you want more money, you need to relook at your skills.
Here are the skills to generate passive income that I wish I had at 20.
The cringeworthy skill that runs your life
Life is a series of sales you have to make.
People hate when I say this. They get angry with referral programs that payout money and call them unethical or Ponzi Schemes. No.
You’re just afraid to sell. That’s the harsh truth.
Learn to self yourself. The trick is to do without bragging or overdoing it. Undersell. Most of all, remove your ego. When you fuse a huge ego with the skill of selling, it can ruin your life.
Nobody wants to get persuaded by a jackass that thinks they’re too cool for school.
The basics of sales are simple:
- Understand entry-level human psychology
- Give more than you take
- Focus on other people, not yourself
- Communicate your value simply
- Provide evidence of why someone should buy into your idea
We sell every day whether we like it or not. No point crying about it. Selling amplifies any version of passive income.
Learn to sell, make tonnes of money.
Unselfish storytelling
My 20s were full of trauma — most of it caused by me.
I first told the story 8 years ago online. I did it because I wanted it to inspire others. This accidental mistake became a magnet for opportunities.
Rather than turning my story of trauma into some victimhood cry for attention, or some personal brand mumbo jumbo, I turned it into a form of life education normal people could relate to.
How?
I exposed all parts of the story, not just the nice parts that made me feel good. I chunked down different parts into lessons, then repointed them back to the audience. I asked questions to the audience. I even made changes when I saw shortcomings in the story that were unhelpful.
Storytelling is the basis for many passive income streams.
Even if your goal is to earn passive income from property, you still need a real estate agent to help you find a house to buy. If the person you find falls in love with your story, they’ll show you off-market properties you could only dream of finding.
Learn to tell your life story. It has enormous value. Use it as a magnet for passive income opportunities, and to attract other humans that can make your financial goals come true.
Learn to write online
Normal writing and online writing aren’t the same.
Many people think they are, so they fail before they start. No one wants to read university essays online in predictable formats. Nobody cares about perfect grammar or spelling (the best writers break both these rules).
We do care about getting to the point. We need the headline or first sentence to grab us so we can decide if your words are worth the most valuable asset we have: time.
I wish back in 2009 when I joined Twitter that I had taken the time to master it. I’d probably have a podcast bigger than Tim Ferriss by now if I did. Twitter is where people like me that write stuff with too many words get their asses character-restricted and spanked. Ooo baby.
At a simple level, writing online can be a source of direct passive income. Go to Quora, Substack, Vocal Media, Newsbreak, etc and you’ll quickly find out.
Passive income you get directly from writing online isn’t the best source.
Wait, what?
Yep, passive income from writing can make you lazy. You can become entitled and think your words should get you paid. Nope. It’s why I am so glad I started to write online when there was no way to directly earn passive income from writing. I wrote for free.
My friends: “You write on a blog where the owner keeps all the money. Demand money. Now.”
They called me stupid. They were right. Except while I didn’t get paid in dollars, I got paid by learning an important skill. The best passive income you can make is from email subscribers you later offer products and services to.
Few would-be passive income badasses remember this.
The amplifier of human potential
Writing doesn’t just make you direct passive income or get you email subscribers. Writing clarifies your thinking.
You get good at generating ideas and communicating them beautifully. Clear thoughts also lead to passive income ideas.
Bottom line: writing online improves every aspect of your life.
Uncommon email badassery
Email and passive income might seem bizarro.
How does email make money? Doesn’t email steal your time? It depends. Do you send email or reply to email?
Storytelling and writing online bring you closer to other humans. You can help those humans with lessons you learned from a regular job or with your life experience. If you collect email addresses of everyone you encounter, you can send helpful newsletters. You can email videos or blog posts.
Most people royally screw up the skill of sending emails.
It’s why online passive income streams fail. It breaks my heart.
Email is a nuanced skill. You have to learn the tiny subtleties that make up a skill you probably think you’ve already mastered. I sent lots of emails at 20. Hardly any got a reply. None made money.
Here’s what I didn’t know back then:
- Remove 90% of the self-interest from your emails. We can hear it a mile away and it’s painful AF.
- Become disciplined with how many times you ask. Most of you ask way too much in emails. We don’t join an email list to get asked to buy stuff every day that makes you passive income (see sales skill above).
- Send shorter emails. We all have too many emails. Remove the fluff to get to the gold.
- Less automation. Most emails sound like they came from a robot. They’re not personal. They’re written by copywriters. They’re pre-scheduled and action-based. We’re unlikely to give you money if your emails are impersonal.
The last 12 months have shown the power of email. Entire passive income businesses get built on email.
Learn email. Choose your poison — Substack, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Beehiiv, Ghost … what evs.
The second level of email
There’s one problem with email: unsubscribes.
One bad move and people will get off your email list, fast. That’s why this year many people are using the Discord App (similar to Slack) to stay connected with audiences. The open rate on direct messages is higher than email.
Pro tip: send email and start a Discord group.
Sending DMs that get replies
I’m going to sound stupid. Forgive me.
I always thought of DMs as a way to contact people. Then I saw a bunch of side hustlers talking about DMs as a passive income source.
WTF?
Yep, many of them have ways they make money online where they sell stuff 1–1. Some of those passive income sources are high-ticket purchases too. They do it all via DMs.
They get active income from the DMs they send, then those DMs turn into passive income once the customer is on board.
In my 20s I sent plenty of Facebook DMs. Very few got an answer. The ones that did had some version of “get the F off my DMs you bastard!” Now I know what works.
The best DMs contain zero self-interest. Read that again.
Learn how to put your wants to the side. Talk to people in DMs without trying to get something out of them all the time. I copped this a lot. People see “500m views” and go “great, I’m going to exploit that for myself.”
Don’t limit your potential.
Remove self-interest. Build online relationships.
The best passive income sources I’ve had access to all came from other people I met. These relationships later led to partnerships that compounded the passive income further.
Other people help your passive income go exponential. Master DMs.
It all (bizarrely) boils down to this
I just read this article back because I’m a spelling moron. There’s a key theme.
If you’re a taker you’re not going to make it.
You make passive income by being unselfish. No make-money-online-course teaches that. Soft skills make you a millionaire if mastered.
I wish I knew that at 20. Better late than never.
– Tim Denning
P.S. There’s one platform I didn’t mention in the “writing online” section. LinkedIn.
It’s a passive income skill that almost NOBODY talks about.
Nearly 400,000 people found me through LinkedIn.
Now, I want to help people find you.
Will you take 60 seconds to let me know what you’d like to learn about LinkedIn?
