I have been chasing some version of passive income for the better part of twenty years.
Not always consistently. Not always intelligently. Not always with anything resembling a plan.
Sometimes it looked like side projects. Sometimes it looked like domain names purchased late at night with too much optimism and not enough execution. Sometimes it looked like half-built apps, abandoned blogs, monetization ideas, affiliate schemes, YouTube concepts, newsletters, digital products, and vague plans to eventually “build an audience.”
Like a lot of people in tech, I was heavily influenced by The 4-Hour Workweek.
That book landed in my brain at exactly the right time. It had this intoxicating idea at the center of it: maybe work did not need to look the way everyone said it needed to look. Maybe you did not need to grind away for forty years, retire with a pension, and finally start living once your knees stopped cooperating. Maybe you could build systems. Maybe you could automate. Maybe you could separate income from hours.
Maybe, if you were clever enough, you could escape.
I still think there is something beautiful in that idea.
I am just no longer convinced that “passive income” is the right phrase for it.
Because after twenty years of thinking about this, trying things, watching others try things, and seeing an entire internet economy grow up around the dream of making money while you sleep, I have come to a fairly boring conclusion:
Most passive income is not passive.
It is labour wearing a fake moustache.
Sometimes it is upfront labour. Sometimes it is financial risk. Sometimes it is luck. Sometimes it is audience building. Sometimes it is customer support, maintenance, content production, algorithm appeasement, tax complexity, platform dependency, and the emotional burden of waking up to discover that Stripe, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Shopify, Meta, Apple, or some other platform-shaped weather system has decided today is the day your tiny business gets to experience climate change.
That does not mean the dream is fake.
It just means the branding is a little dishonest.
The alternative, unfortunately, has often been worse. Hustle culture took the valid desire for autonomy and turned it into a kind of performative suffering. Wake up at 4:30. Cold plunge. Journal. Lift. Build. Sell. Post. Network. Optimize. Monetize every interest. Turn every quiet thought into content. Turn every relationship into a funnel. Turn every hobby into a brand.
There is a version of ambition that starts to feel like being haunted by a LinkedIn post.
I do not want that either.
I have a family. I have kids. I have a mortgage. I have health goals. I have creative interests. I have side projects I genuinely care about. I have too many browser tabs open, both literally and spiritually.
And, maybe most importantly, I no longer have the easiest excuse.
I left my corporate day job in February.
That still feels strange to write.
I am now almost three months into what I have been calling, depending on the day and my level of confidence, a retirement trial, a sabbatical, a career pause, an experiment, or possibly an early warning sign.
For years, I told myself some version of:
If I only had more time, I would build the thing.
The thing changed depending on the season. A product. A platform. A blog. A content engine. A consulting offer. A creative business. A passive income stream. A portfolio of small bets. Some clever arrangement of software, writing, and automation that would quietly begin to compound in the background.
Then I finally got the time.
And, unsurprisingly, life still happened.
There were family things. House things. Health things. Admin things. Decision fatigue. Weird pockets of inertia. Days that looked open on the calendar but somehow disappeared into errands, appointments, chores, and the ambient fog of not having a normal work structure anymore.
I have built some things. I have written some things. I have made progress.
But am I dramatically closer to the old dream of passive income and elegant lifestyle design?
Not really.
Which is humbling.
Because the uncomfortable truth is that time was never the only constraint.
Energy matters. Focus matters. Clarity matters. Courage matters. Distribution matters. Taste matters. The ability to decide what not to do matters. The ability to keep going when nobody is asking you for a status update really matters.
That is the part I probably underestimated.
So lately I have been thinking about a different phrase.
Minimum Viable Hustle.
The smallest sustainable amount of intentional effort required to keep opportunity alive.
Not passive income.
Not grind culture.
Something in between.
A lightweight operating model for building leverage without letting the project consume the life it was supposed to improve.
The old dream
The 4-Hour Workweek dream was powerful because it gave language to a thing many people felt but did not know how to say.
The default life plan seemed suspicious.
Work hard. Save. Climb. Accumulate. Wait. Then, someday, when you are older, wealthier, and less physically capable of enjoying it, begin the part of life that was supposedly the point.
Ferriss called that out. He made people question whether retirement should be deferred to the end of life, rather than distributed throughout it. He made people think about automation, delegation, location independence, and lifestyle design. For a certain type of person, especially a certain type of tech-adjacent person, it was gasoline on the imagination.
The problem is that the fantasy version of it was much easier to absorb than the practical version.
The fantasy was:
Build a thing once.
Automate it.
Disappear to a beach.
Check your bank account occasionally.
Become insufferable at dinner parties.
The reality was usually messier.
Products need support. Content needs distribution. Businesses need customers. Customers need trust. Trust takes time. Systems break. Suppliers change. Algorithms shift. Ads get expensive. Competitors appear. Your “automated” business quietly becomes a badly paid job with worse benefits.
Still, I do not think the dream was wrong.
I think it was incomplete.
The valuable part was never really “work four hours.”
The valuable part was asking:
What would it take to make my work more leveraged?
What would it take to make my effort compound?
What would it take to create more options than I currently have?
Those are still good questions.
Maybe better questions now than ever.
Passive income is mostly a myth, but leverage is real
I have become increasingly suspicious of the phrase passive income.
Rental properties are not passive. Dividend investing is closer, but only if you already have capital. Digital products are not passive unless someone continues to find them, trust them, buy them, use them, and not ask for a refund. Software is not passive because software is a living organism that survives by eating your weekends.
Even content is not passive. A blog post can compound, yes. A YouTube video can keep generating attention. A useful tool can keep attracting users. But all of that usually sits on top of years of accumulated taste, skill, distribution, credibility, and maintenance.
So maybe the goal is not passive income.
Maybe the goal is asymmetric effort.
Small actions that have the potential to create outsized returns.
A blog post that explains what you think.
A tool that solves a problem once, then keeps solving it.
A template that saves someone an hour.
A productized service that turns expertise into a repeatable offer.
A platform that starts small but teaches you something every time someone uses it.
A public artifact that lets people understand what you are about before they ever meet you.
That, to me, feels more honest.
Not passive.
Leveraged.
Why minimum matters
The word “minimum” is doing a lot of work here.
Minimum does not mean lazy.
It means sustainable.
It means the system has to survive contact with your actual life.
This is where a lot of side projects fail. At least for me.
I get excited. I overbuild. I imagine the full platform, the full brand, the full launch plan, the full content strategy, the full product roadmap, the full beautiful machine.
Then real life shows up.
Or worse, real life does not even show up in some dramatic way.
You just have a Tuesday.
A Tuesday with groceries, a dentist appointment, a kid who needs a drive somewhere, a nagging task you have been avoiding, three tabs open about some technical issue, a half-finished post, and the vague sense that you are somehow both very busy and not making enough progress.
That is the texture of it.
It is not always heroic resistance.
Sometimes it is just entropy.
Minimum Viable Hustle asks a different question.
Not:
What could this become if I had unlimited time?
But:
What is the smallest version of this that I can keep doing even during a normal, messy week?
That might be one blog post.
It might be one useful LinkedIn post.
It might be one small improvement to a product.
It might be one customer conversation.
It might be one short story published to ScribeLoft.
It might be one repeatable consulting offer.
It might be one tiny artifact that makes the next artifact easier.
The point is not to do everything.
The point is to keep the flywheel moving.
Slowly is fine.
Stopped is the problem.
Why hustle still matters
I know “hustle” is a loaded word now.
For good reason.
It has been used to justify burnout, insecurity, and the idea that any moment not monetized is somehow wasted. That version of hustle is exhausting. It also seems, frankly, a little sad.
But there is another version of hustle that I still believe in.
The version that means taking initiative.
The version that means not waiting for permission.
The version that means building small things in public.
The version that means noticing opportunities and doing something with them.
The version that means making your own luck slightly more likely.
I do not want to hustle in the GaryVee sense of becoming a human content sprinkler system.
But I do want to keep creating.
I want to keep writing.
I want to keep building.
I want to keep experimenting.
I want to keep putting small bets into the world.
I want to keep creating assets that might compound.
That is the hustle part.
The minimum part is what keeps it sane.
AI changes the shape of the problem
There is also an AI angle here, because of course there is.
AI has changed the cost structure of small bets.
It is now much easier to draft, prototype, summarize, research, package, refactor, generate images, build landing pages, create workflows, test ideas, and turn vague thoughts into artifacts.
That does not mean everything is easy.
It definitely does not mean everything is good.
In fact, the internet is already filling up with AI-generated sludge at a rate that makes the early SEO content farms look charming and artisanal.
But for people who have taste, context, judgment, and actual lived experience, AI is a serious leverage tool.
Not because it replaces the work.
Because it lowers the activation energy.
That matters more than I think we appreciate.
A lot of creative and entrepreneurial work dies before it starts because the first step is too heavy. The blank page is heavy. The first prototype is heavy. The first draft is heavy. The first diagram is heavy. The first version of the pitch is heavy.
AI makes the first version lighter.
You still need to care. You still need to edit. You still need to decide what is worth saying. You still need to bring the taste. You still need to know when something sounds like every other synthetic beige rectangle on the internet.
But the distance between idea and artifact has collapsed.
That makes Minimum Viable Hustle more realistic than it would have been ten years ago.
Maybe even five years ago.
It also removes one more excuse.
Which is both exciting and annoying.
What this looks like for me
For me, this is still emerging.
I am not writing this from the mountaintop.
I am writing it from somewhere in the messy middle, almost three months into an experiment I am still trying to understand while I am living inside it.
And to be fair to myself, I have not exactly done nothing.
ScribeLoft is one piece of it. A creative workspace for AI-assisted storytellers. Part platform, part writing experiment, part excuse to think deeply about what happens when storytelling becomes more abundant.
Agentic North Labs is another. A place to explore agentic systems, AI workflows, strange product ideas, and the practical architecture of this next software era.
But there have been others too.
I built humaninloop.work, which sits somewhere between a satire, a concept, a statement, and a possible services offering around the future of human-AI interaction.
I built agenticinbox.cc, because the idea of an inbox designed for agents, not just humans, feels increasingly inevitable to me.
I started Cipher Lane, a Suno-powered music project, because apparently “minimum viable hustle” can also include becoming a synthetic music producer with a fictional brand and questionable genre discipline.
I built AIToolz.info, an AI news aggregation site, along with a nearly 100 episode podcast and a prolific AI-agent managed Bluesky account attached to the Lorie Lowell persona.
There have also been prototypes. A Raspberry Pi Zero agent. An “Office” multi-agent system. A 402files prototype using the x402 protocol. AgentVista, an agent tooling capability platform. Various experiments that are somewhere between product research, creative outlet, and “I wonder if this can be built in a weekend.”
So no, the last three months have not been empty.
If anything, they have confirmed that making things is not really my problem.
I can make things.
Maybe too many things.
The harder part is turning those things into a coherent system.
A product is not automatically a business.
A domain is not automatically distribution.
A prototype is not automatically traction.
A clever idea is not automatically an offer.
A pile of assets is not automatically a strategy.
That is the humbling part.
For years, I thought the missing ingredient was time. If I could just get out from under the corporate calendar, I would have the space to finally build the thing.
Then I got the time.
And I built several things.
But I am not dramatically closer to the clean, elegant, self-sustaining machine I used to imagine.
At least not yet.
What I have instead is a constellation.
Some stars are brighter than others. Some are probably space junk. Some might become something if I keep feeding them. Some are just evidence that I was thinking out loud with code, domains, writing, and AI tools.
Minimum Viable Hustle, for me, may be the process of turning that constellation into a map.
Not by making everything bigger.
By deciding what deserves another week.
By deciding what gets published, packaged, priced, or parked.
By accepting that the work is not just building the assets.
The work is choosing which assets are allowed to become part of the operating system.
And maybe that is where I am right now.
Not at the start.
Not at the finish.
Standing in the middle of a weird little workshop full of half-polished machines, trying to decide which ones are toys, which ones are tools, and which ones might someday pay the electric bill.
And if I am being honest, it is also about building a structure for myself.
Because after leaving a corporate job, you discover pretty quickly that a calendar can be a cage, but it can also be scaffolding.
When nobody is expecting you in a meeting, nobody is also forcing you to prioritize.
That freedom is wonderful.
It is also weirdly dangerous.
Minimum Viable Hustle is partly my attempt to give the freedom a shape.
The rules I am considering
I do not have a manifesto.
That would be too much hustle.
But I do have some rules I am starting to like.
One, the work has to create an artifact
A conversation is good. Thinking is good. Reading is good. But at some point, something should exist that did not exist before.
A post. A page. A prototype. A diagram. A story. A tool. A template. A product. A note that can become something later.
Artifacts compound better than intentions.
Two, the artifact should be useful to future me or someone else
Not everything needs to be monetized. In fact, most things probably should not be monetized too early.
But useful is a good filter.
Would this help someone understand something?
Would this save someone time?
Would this clarify my own thinking?
Would this make the next version easier?
Would this attract the kind of conversation I want to have?
If yes, it is probably worth making.
Three, the system has to fit inside real life
If the plan requires me to become a different person with a different calendar, it is not a plan. It is fan fiction.
A good system should survive a busy week.
It should survive family life.
It should survive low energy.
It should survive imperfect consistency.
It should probably survive a trip to Home Depot.
Minimum Viable Hustle should feel like a practice, not a second job.
Four, the goal is optionality
This might be the most important one.
The goal is not necessarily to quit everything and move to a beach.
I already quit the thing, at least for now.
The beach did not magically appear.
The goal is to create options.
Optionality in income.
Optionality in reputation.
Optionality in skills.
Optionality in relationships.
Optionality in the kinds of work available in the future.
A single blog post probably will not change your life.
But a hundred thoughtful public artifacts might.
A single prototype probably will not become a company.
But ten prototypes might teach you where the real opportunity is.
A single small product probably will not replace your salary.
But a portfolio of small, useful bets might eventually change the shape of your life.
A more honest dream
I still like the old dream.
I still like the idea of systems that work for you.
I still like the idea of income that is not perfectly coupled to hours.
I still like the idea of escaping the default path.
I still like the idea of designing life with more intention.
I am just less interested in pretending it is easy.
The dream was never really to do nothing.
At least not for me.
The dream was to have more control over what I do, what I build, who I work with, and how much of my life gets consumed by things I do not actually care about.
That is still worth pursuing.
But maybe the path is not passive income.
Maybe the path is Minimum Viable Hustle.
Small bets.
Useful artifacts.
Sustainable effort.
Compounding leverage.
Enough ambition to keep moving.
Enough restraint to keep living.
I am almost three months into having the thing I thought I needed most: time.
And I am learning that time helps, but it does not solve the whole problem.
It lets you build.
It does not tell you what to build next.
It lets you start.
It does not force you to finish.
It gives you room to create assets.
It does not automatically turn those assets into income, distribution, or a coherent strategy.
That is the work now.
Not just making more things.
Making the things connect.
Minimum Viable Hustle feels like a version of the dream I can believe in.
More importantly, it feels like one I might actually be able to sustain.