Although it's become fashionable to claim there's really no such thing as passive income, that is a myth. There are multiple truly passive income streams you can create for yourself. Investing in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. are all good examples. The problem is when we try to go too far beyond those. For example, writing on Medium is *not* passive income. Sure, once you've written a lot of articles, you'll get *some* income from older articles for a while. However, try not publishing anything for a few months and your "passive" income will dry up. The same or similar issues come up with POD or selling digital products. You need to market them, which isn't passive. Becoming a silent partner in a business is a little like investing in stocks, just as a massively concentrated bet on a single business. In general, the difference between passive and active income is how much effort you have to put in upfront before seeing any income relative to the size of the income you want. If you want to get $100/year, you can work hard enough to make $1000, invest it in stocks, and let it ride. If you can make $50/hour, that will take you around 30 hours (accounting for taxes). That's on top of however hard you need to work to support yourself in the present. Want $100k/year? Work an extra 35,000 hours (unless you increase your hourly rate, accounting for progressive taxes). Of course, if you want to take out $100k/year from your portfolio forever, you'll need to at least double that to 70,000 hours. Compared to working 70,000 *extra* hours on top of how much you need to work to cover present expenses, working just to cover expenses is much easier. You just have to accept that you'll never be able to retire...