Passive Income

Financial independence is not about having more money, it's about having more time. More time to do the things that you want to do.

You only get a finite amount of time to spend in this life and with each passing moment, your time runs out. When you understand this fact of life, you realize that time is actually more valuable than money.

So, what do you want to do with your time?

I for one, want to do many things and travel the world, and one way to achieve this time and location independence would be with Passive Income, an income received on a regular basis, with little or no effort required to maintain it, i.e., money received with a non-linear investment of time.

Passive Income is the opposite of Active Income, an income that is received with a linear investment of time, e.g., charging by the hour like in consulting, working for a monthly salary or selling stuff (handicraft, food) you create by hand. Since your directly trading time for money, if you stop investing the time, you stop making money.

From the above, it should be obvious that focusing on Passive Income is a better investment of the finite time you have.

Here are some examples of Passive Income generators:

• Information Products (e-books, audio/video tutorials)
• Software Products
• Royalties  (Books, Photographs, Music, Patents)
• Rental property

Big Companies

• Big companies have greater entropy and therefore increased inefficiencies.
• Increased inefficiencies result in greater viscosity; you need to put in a lot more effort to get something done.
• Dealing with these inefficiencies (processes) generates a lot of busy work, work that is time consuming but not valuable.
• Busy work dilutes focus and results in even further inefficiencies and the vicious cycle continuous till you end up with individual goals that are orthogonal to the companies goals.
• Everyone in the company has a different context and is dealing with a different level of abstraction. Assuming that transparency is the key to keeping people aligned misses the point that the goals need to be communicated differently to different individuals within the company. This is a very hard problem to solve.

Good ideas are hard; Implementation is easy!

All closed systems of any significant value will be reverse engineered eventually

While writing that tweet, I remembered a conversation I had with @rasmus a long time ago at foss.in where he said he prefered a BSD license for PHP over GPL, because they could easily replicate any significant proprietary/closed changes that businesses might make.

That's when it struck me: Any idea that becomes significant, can easily be implemented. It's coming up with a good idea in the first place that's hard.

Directing Attention

Its astonishing, how little control we exercise in directing our attention. We usually let it go where it wants to; attracted, demanded or manipulated by external sources.

Today, on my way to work, I chose to direct my attention to the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. I noticed the beautiful silhouettes made by the shadows of trees, flags and the birds flying above. They were always there, but I had never seen them before.

Its scary the amount of detail our senses leave out.

The Art of Achieving

In a cafe mocha (from Barista of course) induced moment of clarity in the middle of the night this Monday (22 Feb, 2010) , I finally understood why, for a while now, I've had this nagging running-in-place-and-not-getting-anywhere feeling. With this new insight, I came up with a simple Personal Accomplishment System for myself. I'll be posting more on this soon, but first I need to check if it works for me.

Setting up an offline dictionary on Ubuntu

Note: I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)


There are two ways to do this that I know off:

Install Artha, an off-line thesaurus based on WordNet

sudo apt-get install artha

Or, you can configure Dictionary to use a local dictionary server

Install a local dictionary server and required dictionaries and thesaurus:

sudo apt-get install dictd dictzip dict-wn dict-foldoc dict-jargon dict-gcide dict-moby-thesaurus

Configure Dictionary to use the local dictionary:

Application > Office > Dictionary
Edit > Preferences

Add a new source using 127.0.0.1 as the Hostname and select it as your default source.


Hope that helps.