Generate Passive Income While Looking for Your Career
“How to create passive income” might be a question of high interest for many of us. Moving from being a student to joining the workforce can seem expensive. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be on a beach, holding a cocktail in your hand and having money come into your bank account in the meantime? Sounds good, right?
We have some super useful tips for you on how to create passive income while you’re on your career search:
1. Preamble
You are going to have to let yourself get bored. If you are always sucking up content via social media, YouTube, Hulu, TV, whatever, your brain is going to be too stuffed to till for ideas. This mindless consumption of entertainment is going to fill up the ground of your mind with weeds. To avoid this, you are going to have to take breaks from it for hours, if not days at a time to get going on your side hustle and learn how to create that passive income. You’ll need a lot of mental bandwidth. So, weed out that mind and invite creativity.
2. Key Steps on How to Create Passive Income
Mine What’s Already There
Where does your mind wander when you are at work, driving, or in those check-out lines? Pay attention to what you think about during your waning hours before sleep, what you read articles about, and what catches your attention on social media. Consequently, you’ll notice what is in there, bouncing around your mind already and that you have a natural interest in. Follow that vein of thinking and learn how to create a passive income out of it.
Look for the Patterns
Write down what you find. This is pretty simple, eh? Take notes on what your mind is doing. To make this convenient, you may want to carry around a small notebook or take notes in your phone. Notice and document what you have a natural, inherent, genuine interest in. Who are you following on social? What do they write about/create/build? Start a list of all the oddities, cool stuff, and engrossing things that you find your mind is already. Write down the list of all the stuff you are interested in and that you notice around you. Now, pick the scariest thing on it. It should feel thrilling or it’s not going to stick.
Go to the Source
Avoid as much as possible looking up who’s doing what in your area of interest. Do a deep dive of the history of the thing you’re interested in. For example, if you really love jewelry making, don’t go look at a bunch of jeweler’s websites. Get deep in the history of jewelry. Research what different ancient cultures did with it. Why it’s important, how it evolved. Same with car mechanics, religion, furniture building. It literally does not matter. You have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips. Become an expert in your field of genius.
Invest Your Time and Money
If you want to build furniture and have no clue how, you are going to have to read books, buy the tools, and commit the time to learn your craft. You can also find a teacher and ask them to mentor you. In addition, you can watch a ton of YouTube videos. Do not enter this lightly. Approach your craft with a beginner’s mind. Because different people do things differently, learning different approaches to your process will bring special value to your expertise. Even the experts have stuff to learn, so stay open to the goodies.
Build the Things
Don’t worry about quality, screw-ups, and waste. Just make. Document. Take notes. Make, make, make. Video if you want to record your process for yourself or for others. If it makes sense for you to pursue a new job in this field, do it. There’s no rule that says work has to suck.
Share What You Know – Go Digital
There are literally no bounds to the numbers of people you can reach through various internet channels. Bob Burg teaches that Value You Provide x Number of People You Serve = Your Financial Success. Because you have already created a value proposition (since you have made yourself an expert in your zone of genius) you can share that expertise with others. Show them what you know and how you put it into practice. However, you don’t have to share your secret sauce if you don’t want to. The closer someone gets to the genius, the more your time costs. For example, putting out a 6-minute YouTube video on playing the guitar can be done cheaply. But, someone that wants to buy an hour or two of an expert guitar player’s time is going to be paying a much higher price. Giving away the good stuff is how people are going to find you in this interconnected world, so don’t be stingy with your gifts.
Pay it Forward
Mentor someone else. If you lament the lack of good (diesel mechanics, hair color experts, ServiceNow implementation experts, whatever your zone of genius is), teach someone else. Take notes on your process. Jot down what worked and make note of what didn’t. Everything is progress.
Create Training, Write a Book, and Blog Posts
Keep building on what you’ve learned through this process and creating digital training. This is an excellent way to create passive income. Write a book that you charge to download. Record a video series. Create a course. A book download, an online course, or a video series is a great way to turn your side hustle into a passive income stream. You create it once, and it provides income for months, if not years. Passive income is the key to the kingdom. Eventually, we all learn that trading hours for money is a bit of a trap we can never escape. So, escape through your zone of genius, your genuine interests, and showing others your path.
Real-Life Discovery
We don’t know what we don’t know. Asking a 16 to 26-year-old to figure out what they want to do by making the best guess is ridiculous. That’s why we created our “Real World of Work” program. The initiative enables you to complete a series of courses and rotation activities to get familiar with how businesses run.
After the program, you get an internship to explore your area of interest in the industry you’re most motivated to work in. Once you’ve established a career match, you can choose to pursue an advanced degree to refine your ability to become a specialist and work for companies which need your skills.
If you think this could be valuable for you or a young adult in your life, find out more about our Real World of Work program. Companies Hiring and Educators can participate in the program to connect with the job seekers of tomorrow.
Work and Learn
Some tests try to confine you to a certain limit of what you can accomplish. We prefer to figure out what your baseline is to help you reach your potential. In over 25 years of hiring and supporting job seekers, we’ve seen people rise to the challenge of any job, well beyond what tests showed they could. This is because drive, motivation and circumstances change. Sometimes, it’s simply about providing a path to learn the technical skills needed to boost confidence.
pepelwerk’s unique ability to get education closer to the job market and build career matches lets us connect job seekers with the courses they need to get the work they want. As long as they’re motivated to get it!
Work Survival Specialists
Experienced adults in your life are invaluable for making great decisions of all kinds. When it comes to work, having an opportunity to talk to experienced people to get informed guidance makes all the difference.
Career discovery includes honest feedback about what your goals are, your likelihood of accomplishing them and connecting them to your behaviors and aptitude. pepelwerk’s Career Coaches look to make a successful career match for the long-term. Work isn’t a ladder, it’s a slide.
Explore our Career Coaching Services to learn more about how they can support your future.
Summary: It’s Time to Find Your Career Match
Career planning and aptitude may have fallen short in the past but pepelwerk aims to change all that. We need to create a more human experience earlier in our work lives. It’s as simple as making the connection between jobs, education and the individual.
Graduates and job seekers can download the pepelwerk job matching app and create a Talent profile to get matched with jobs. Once you’re signed up, you can enjoy our range of Career Matching support and services. It’s your work-life, so take control of it!