Time is precious. It’s sacred. Just 24 hours in a day. That’s all we get. Not one person on this earth has more time than that. No matter their age, occupation, religion, color of their skin or where they live. No one. Time is the greatest equalizer because not a single person can have more of it. It can never be recreated or re-spent. It exists once, then it’s gone. And that’s precisely why passive income is so important — because time is more valuable than money.

Unlike money, which can be earned, saved, spent, invested, squandered and lost, we can’t tuck away minutes on a clock. We can’t expect dividends on seconds or hours in the bank, or invest the time that we didn’t use on something else. Considering that most of the free world needs to work for a living, consuming much of the time they do have, this precious commodity needs to be nurtured and savored.

Passive income is quite possibly one of the most important and central ways that the rich get richer. It’s how you detach your ability to earn from the time that you do have in a day. If you’ve ever heard the term, making money while you sleep, no truer words have been spoken. With passive income, you do make money while you sleep. You also make money while you’re awake. It’s automatic and simply keeps coming in.

However, creating a passive income stream is far from automatic. It’s no easy feat by any measure. It takes an enormous amount of effort and exertion of your time with very little return in the beginning. It involves an overall sense of frustration and an enormous learning curve. Still, it’s one of the most fruitful and worthwhile investments of your time that you could possibly engage in.

While passive income might not be the answer to all of your immediate problems, it is the pathway to success and most certainly the foundation for wealth and happiness. When you’re not stressed just to make enough money to pay the bills and you’re no longer living from paycheck-to-paycheck, there’s a mental clarity and an emotional catharsis that sets in. You become free from the shackles of a life-sucking 9-to-5 job and begin embracing a more fulfilled life.