How To Make Money: Expectations vs. Reality

How to make money - There are legitimate ways to make money online. The problem is that the real ways to make money aren’t "get rich quick" schemes.

Most of them require a lot of work and sometimes a lot of dedication before seeing a return on our time.

This is about how to make money and debunk some common misconceptions out there about how legit passive income is.

The expectations help us to keep the chosen way, to see the goal and go to it.

But sometimes our expectations can be unfulfilled: instead of bringing us closer to the desired  -  turn into something unrealized.

It leaves behind frustration and a little grudge. In practice, expectations crash against the wall of reality.

Imagine a vertical line. Reality is at the low end of the line. And our expectations are on the top.

Of course, this is a conventional line and just a visual image in order to describe what is happening in the psyche.

Disappointment comes when there is a big gap between expectations and reality. The further one is from the other-the more our disappointment.

We can make high expectations lower and reality higher. It’s good not to go to extremes and work with each of these poles.

There are 5 myths about expectations vs reality in making money.

Myth #1: Passive income lasts forever: We set it up once, and we’re good for life

Focusing on passive income when we’re just starting out trying to make a living online can be very distracting, and very costly.

In 95% of situations, this is not the case -  it will not last forever, at least not without a fairly sizable amount of risk that it disappears.

Most passive income streams will be set up to run for a few months to maybe a decade  -  and then they need to be re adjusted and modified, or maybe they simply become obsolete and they don’t work anymore.

In many other web workers experiences, we’re far better off focusing on “active” income when we’re just getting started.

That means becoming a freelancer and trading our time for money.

First and foremost, we’re simply much more likely to earn a reliable income as a freelancer.

We know that if we put in 5 hours working on a freelance project, we’ll be compensated appropriately for those hours.

With even a mediocre amount of hustle, we should be able to work our way up to a rate of $25 an hour within six months or so.

Work four hours a day, Monday-to-Friday at that rate, and we’re grossing more than $2000 a month.

That will buy us a nice lifestyle in many a tropical country, and give us plenty of free time to actually enjoy it.

With passive income there’s a lot less certainty.

We could spend days, weeks or even months building some amazing product or automated system that we believe will generate passive income.

It’s much smarter to build up a reliable freelancing business first, and have that to fall back on if our later attempts at generating passive income fall short.

Myth #2: Passive income is easy

In short: the road to passive income is mighty tough, and mighty uncertain.

It's not mean that we should never take a risk and invest a bunch of time and energy into a project with little or no guarantee of reward, but it’s foolish to pin ALL our hopes on something like that.

It can be easy once it’s already set up. But setting it up is hard and time consuming, otherwise everyone would be doing it.

Earning passive income, in most cases, is really just like delayed compensation.

We put in a lot of time and effort now with no pay, under the expectation that we’ll get paid all of it back plus interest in the future.

Most of us will not have the discipline to do this, most of us want the immediate results and get frustrated when its been a week and we haven’t earned any money yet.

Then we complain, we quit, and then try something else with similar results. And the same thing happens.

But if we have the persistence to make it work, I have no doubt we’ll make it work.

Myth #3: We need money to make passive income

Most people are interested in is spending their time, not MONEY, creating passive income.

This could be creating and selling a digital product, drop shipping, amazon FBA, affiliate marketing, making YouTube videos, renting out parts of our house that we don’t use, the list goes on.

If we don’t have money to invest, this is the best way to start.

But keep in mind, when making passive income, we are paid in direct relation to the value we provide  -  we cannot just get something for nothing.

It’s good to always have our eyes open for passive income opportunities, even if we’re just starting out.

Just be skeptical and do our due diligence before investing a ton of time and energy into the chase.

Myth #4: Passive income is doing nothing

People often see how much we make from real estate and YouTube and expect it’s all easy money where we just sit around all day.

We sit around all day, but it does require SOME work. For my rental properties, this is usually about 1–2 hours of work per month and his is making sure all bills are paid, rent checks are tracked, and expenses are calculated.

So whatever income stream we take on, chances are it will require SOME level of work even though it might not be much, in 99% of situations, it will be something.

Some more than others, but regardless, by leveraging our time, we’ll likely make WAY more per hour of our time than we could in any other business.

Now we've got many different options to start earning online. If we saw something that really interests us, try it out and learn more about it.

If we’re really wanting to make a full-time income online, we need to be dedicated to learning how to do what we want to do.

There are tons of free resources out there. We just have to search for them!

Myth #5: We need to be an expert on something to make passive income

This is absolutely not the case. For instance, when I started buying real estate, I was NOT an expert.

I made many mistakes and learned as I went along, figuring out each step as I needed it.

When making YouTube videos, I had no idea what I was doing. I watched other YouTube videos each time I was confused, figured it out, and then moved on.

My point being, if we have a goal in mind, it’s not important if we’re not an expert if we have the self motivation to figure it out as we go along.