There’s an expression, to burn your boats. It originated with a military strategy. Hernán Cortés famously “burned the boats,” after arriving in the New World to conquer the Aztec empire. (He actually “scuttled” his ships. He sunk them.) I recently burned my boats, when I killed off a $150,000 passive revenue stream. The birth of a passive income muse In March of 2007, I was sitting with some friends on the cable-locked chairs and tables – at two in the morning – on the porch of a closed restaurant in Austin, Texas. We were doing the kind of thing that we did at the time, after a night of parties at the SXSW conference: We’d sit around and talk about our ideas. Facebook and Twitter were still fringe services – most of the mainstream world knew nothing about them. The internet seemed full of opportunities. The subject of my dating life came up. I was terrible at finding a girlfriend, but I was good at finding dates. I described in great detail to my friends the way I had optimized my process of online dating. I had something to say about what you should write in your profile, what your pictures should be like, and what to say in your messages. I’ve since learned that this is the way I approach many things. I like to get deep into the details, to break it down into a framework, then do my best to explain it in a clear way. I thought I was talking about something very obvious or unexceptional, like tying your shoes, but my friends were on the edges of their seats. As was standard at SXSW at the time, whatever you talked about, there was an idea for a business there. “You HAVE to blog about this,” one friend said. Then, of course, the rest of them piled on. Now, almost 13 years later, I’ve made well over $150,000 off of the blog that I created because of that conversation. I burned my boats Last month, I killed this blog. I didn’t so much kill it as I let it expire. Literally, I simply let the domain expire. I burned my boats. At the height of this blog’s revenue, I earned $11,000 in one month. The amount of work I did on the blog during that month: approximately zero. It was a passive income “muse” as Tim Ferriss would call it. In the days before I killed this blog, I wasn’t earning near that much, but I was earning something. Why burn your boats? Intuitively, it makes no sense to burn your boats. Intuitively, it makes no sense to kill off a passive income stream. Something that’s earning you a profit, without you needing to do any work. But our intuitions aren’t always correct. Our intuitions sometimes see opportunity where there is no opportunity. Our intuitions sometimes see harm where there is no harm. Opportunity where there is no opportunity First, the opportunity where there was no opportunity. The revenue was way down on this site. I made maybe $300 in 2019 off of this site. But, I didn’t do any work on this site. I had a couple of opportunities there. I could invest some time, write a little content, build a few links, and maybe I could bring that revenue back up. I also could sell the site. I even had an interested buyer. But these opportunities weren’t the opportunities they seemed. This has a lot to do with the perception of harm where there is no harm. The real pain of loss aversion In behavioral economics, there’s the concept of “loss aversion.” That losses feel about twice as bad as gains feel good. Losing a $300 a year income stream feels about as bad as gaining a $600 a year income stream feels good. Which is to say that it hurt to kill off this passive income stream. But I reminded myself that the reality was probably not as bad as it actually felt. Added onto that hurt was that this passive income stream held a special emotional significance. This passive income stream made possible the business that I have today. The start I didn't have the heart for First of all, it wasn’t easy for my friends to convince me to start this blog. I didn’t write a book called The Heart to Start because starting things always came