The Role of Passive Income in Building a Meaningful Career

4 min readMay 5, 2016

Career Satisfaction Manifesto Part 5, here’s Part 1.

Today we’re going to talk a bit about money, a key driver of a lot of what we spend our time on. Over the past three weeks we’ve established that being self-directed and managing ourselves well are the building blocks of a meaningful career, and that this doesn’t necessarily mean striking out on your own as an entrepreneur. A more productive approach for the average person, without entrepreneurial acumen, is to reframe the issue.

One of the key motivations behind working for yourself, is the idea that being an employee means that you’re exchanging time for money. Since time is the most precious thing there is, this is a bad deal in the long run. One key way to ensure financial security i.e. money that’s independent of any job, is passive income. We want to develop at least one source of income that we earn even while we sleep. Real estate investing can be one pathway, but it can also wipe out a person’s life savings in a heartbeat via a termite infestation, a rotting foundation, insane tenant, etc. That said, it’s something I continue to research and dabble in, via renting out a portion of my home.

The types of passive income that I’ve been developing since I started my first post-college job are retirement savings in tax-advantaged accounts AND F-You money. Every day, whether the stock market is up or down, my Vanguard index funds earn dividends. They depend on the productivity of the entire world, so I am very bullish for the long term health of my very low expense portfolio and think of drops in the stock market as a huge sale. If all of this sounds completely foreign, or you’ve always had your head in the sand about financial matters, here’s a very simple primer with key things to do and almost more importantly what NOT to do around money management: http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/08/how-i-failed-my-daughter-and-a-simple-path-to-wealth/

Passive income in one form or another is a much better path to financial security than chasing after, or perhaps even “settling for”, a high-paying job in a field you’re not particularly interested in, or that doesn’t provide real value to the world. People who take soul-crushing jobs with the intention of making a boat-load of money and quitting the job in a few years to travel and “give back,” rarely do. Why? They get used to the trappings of the life a high-paying job brings, their friends are also in high-paying jobs, any significant other likely expects them to continue making this type of money, and they wake up 30 years later after a divorce or two with alienated kids and a boatload of money with tons of regret, saying things like this.

Of course, I’m over-simplifying and stereotyping to a massive degree here. The key point is that people rarely quite their jobs when they think they will. As the saying goes: We play like we practice. So…if we practice being people whose souls have been sucked out of us in exchange for cash, there’s a high probability that’s who we’ll become.

So, how do we ensure our financial security, while doing meaningful work? One of the first steps is to be more like the monk in this story, not the king’s minister. In summary: the less we need to live on, the less beholden we are to employers or clients. By living well below our means we get two huge wins: we have a smaller impact on the planet AND we have more freedom to pursue work that’s meaningful to us.

While we’re paying off our student loans and/or building up that F-You money and its resulting passive income, we can have a career that matters by taking charge and managing ourselves. But a meaningful career also involves building community and giving back — ideas we’ll explore in upcoming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

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The Role of Passive Income in Building a Meaningful Career

Written by Marvourneen K. Dolor