Wow. Ok. So, I launched this website and concurrently my passive income project about 150 days ago. The intention was to report regularly on my progress towards creating low-input income streams. Having a look around here it seems that so far I’ve pretty much sucked on both updates and generating income.

So what’s been going on? Well, the truth is that I have sucked on updates to the site, and I haven’t really been able to spend much time putting plans in place to generate new income streams. As it stands, the project has earned a whopping £1.60 from Adsense adverts on the How To pages found on the site and nothing else.

I’m certainly not complaining though. The last few months have been great fun as my girlfriend and I have been deep in the midst of planning our wedding. My regular work has also been very busy as we lost some members of our team and workloads have increased. Both of these things have meant that I haven’t been able to dedicate much time to passive income trials, however I’m going to re-focus and double efforts in the coming months.

My focus in the coming weeks

I haven’t lost my enthusiasm for the passive income project and the aspects of lifestyle design that it entails, so over the next few months I am going to be trying out, and posting results on, the following:

• Zopa, a UK based peer-to-peer lending venture has recently caught my eye, so I’m going to have a nose around and experiment
• iphone apps: I’ve had some good experiences using Elance in the past, so I’m going to look into getting some apps made up by some coding professionals found on Elance
• Going paperless:

Looking forward to getting these mini-projects up-and-running and reporting back to you all

As Pandora found when she was messing around with her box, sometimes you start things, they gain momentum and then woosh, they are beyond your control!

My Pandora’s box moment came after reading The Four Hour Work Week (affiliate link).

Now, many people better qualified than me can tell you about the ins-and-outs of the book, talk you through the more subtle points. Instead, what has stayed with me from the book, what I was amazed by, was how ready it was to take on the assumptions that underlie how we approach work today, and how easily it was able to show many of them to be outdated and irrelevant.

It is this challenging and questioning approach that has infected my thinking. This is the ‘Pandora-process’ that I can’t seen to control or stop. And I’m pleased about it.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

What’s wrong with earning a living?

Earning a living. Simple enough phrase really. 99.9% of the world’s working population go to work everyday and ‘earn a living’. But take a second to think about what the words really mean: Earn. A. Living.

What does the phrase say? More importantly, what is the underlying assumption it makes about work and life? If you think about it, you can see that the phrase implies that you have ‘do’ one thing (earn), in order to ‘have’ another (living). It implies that you have to work, before you are allowed to thrive; that you have to ‘earn’ before you can ‘live’.

Even if it is just a figure a speech (and even if it is, we mustn’t forget that the way we talk about things dramatically impacts our approach to them) I don’t like this assumption that we have to ‘earn a living’, for a number of reasons. Most of my reasons are focused on what it seems to imply about the deferring of one’s life to a later date in lieu of earning now. Life is NOW, not in the future, at some unspecified date. But I won’t go into that now. For the moment I’ll just ask:

What about earning WHILE living instead?

What about you?

Have you experienced a change to your thinking or approach to life?
What spurred that change?
What examples do you have of flawed thinking and bogus assumptions in our everyday approach to work and life?