Passive income

The term is badly abused. Genuinely passive income exists - index fund dividends, bond coupons - but it requires capital you already have. Everything marketed as passive income to people without capital is front-loaded work: a course, a rental, a content library, a product. The income is not passive, it is deferred.

A more useful framing is effort-to-income decoupling. Ask how much your income would fall if you stopped working for three months. If the answer is "not much", the asset is doing its job, whatever you call it.