Nicolas Cole argues that income is determined by skill, not time or effort. Using the example of self-published books on Amazon, he shows how early attempts may earn only small royalties (e.g., $3.48), but skill accumulation across multiple books can scale royalties into significant passive income (his library now generates over $200,000/year). The central takeaway: outcomes reflect skill development, not mere expenditure of time or effort.
Chapters
How much money you earn in life is not based on time or effort. It's based on skill. Alright, so here's an example. Let's say you want to make some passive income and someone tells you, I wrote a book and it's making me passive income selling on Amazon. So you think, oh, that's all I have to do. I just have to write a book and put it on Amazon and I'll start making passive income. What happens is this person churns out a book, then puts it up for sale and has a meltdown because they only earned $3.48 in royalties for the entire year. And the conclusion they come to is, I guess writing books is a horrible way of producing passive Inc. Which is not true. You did earn passive income. You earned $3.48. The mistake was thinking that if you took the time or expended the effort to write a book, then money would start magically raining down from the sky and you would suddenly start generating tens of thousands of dollars in passive income. Except time and effort are horrible measures of value. The reason that you got paid $3.48 is a reflection of your skill. It was your first book. I barely made $2,000 from that book. Was the vehicle wrong? Are books horrible at generating passive income? Of course not. I was just a begin result that you only unlock once your skill increases. So I wrote another book and another book. And now almost a decade Later, I've written 10 books and my self published library generates over $200,000 per year in passive income, all from book royalties. So stop thinking just because you did something once that you deserve this giant outcome. Outcomes are not a reflection of time or effort, they are a reflection of skill.
