Aggressive Income

I have been doing a great deal of reading lately during COVID-19. I have read many self-help books as well as financial planning books and books dealing with improving your daily habits to focus more on mindfulness. Mindfullness is a funny word which is really popular lately and maybe means different things to different people. Whatever it means, I tend to have my own definitions for concepts and ideas and often my word is different from the popular cultures word. Mindfulness to me means to be aware of what you are doing and what is going on in your life at the current moment. If COVID-19 has done anything, it has made people more mindful of their life as it was prior to COVID-19. In a way, it is a grand experiment in the cruelest way possible. So many people have died and sufferred due to COVID-19. Covid-19 has created a painting of our lives and has contrasted what it was like before, during, and soon it will define after. We all know how we were living prior to it. Then it hit. Then we sat there and thought a lot about things. The distractions we filled our lives with simply vanished in many cases. Even work changed or disappeared for some. We spent more time with our kids and our husbands and wives. It was easier to look back on our previous behaviors and see what we were doing more clearly because the distractions had vanished or been replaced. Either way, our lives were staring us in the face more then ever. We had to home school our kids, work from home, shop for groceries in fear, and find way to occupy ourselves. When that failed I would sit and think about what I was doing before all this happened and what I could do to change my life trajectory for the better. Hence all the self-help books and financial planning books. I also decided to begin blogging again but not just about athletic training or comopetition but about whatever interests me, and that is a lot. I am a bit hyperactve or ADHD. I jump around a lot in my conversations and ideas...I will try to stay on topic for now. Which brings me to the title of this article, 'Aggressive Income". We have all heard the term "Passive Income". I am not sure who coined the term but to me it is a bit misleading. Passive income is the term given to income which is received without working or doing very little to obtain the money. Even blogging is considered passive income. However, there is nothing passive about passive income. For most, in order to obtain a passive stream of income you must do some very aggressive things. Rental property is considered passive income. However, obtaining, fixing, and renting real estate is a very aggressive endeavor. You are competing every step of the way with other people doing the same thing. It is not passive but agressive income. There are forms of passive income. Someone giving you money as a gift or family inheritance. Winning the lottery which even that takes some effort, and that income received from investments in the stock market. There is probably more examples that I am leaving out. However, at least 50% of passive income streams require some very aggressive actions up front at the minimum to get started. Most require continued effort to maintain. The income maybe easier to obtain than a job but the argument can be made that some "jobs" are actually passive income because they require such little effort to maintain. These are rare but they do exist. When reading my financial books I have come to realize that passive income really doesn't exist. Even the stock market requires you to have money to invest to begin with and in most cases you have to earn that money and then save it which are two very aggressive actions in my opinion. Also, if you notice those who seem to aquire wealth are not passive people. Some maybe very nice, cordial, and polite but most are very focused, driven, disciplined, and yes...aggressive.