If you have read my About Me page or even just the title of this post, then you’ll know I have bipolar type 2 disorder. I was diagnosed in 2010 and I have to say life has been progressively more and more amazing after this discovery.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to downplay the seriousness of having bipolar but when I got diagnosed I finally had an answer to all the crap that didn’t seem to make sense while growing up. I finally had an accurate direction pointing me towards how to live a happy fulfilling life.

I spent 3 years during Uni rewiring old habits, developing new ones and really understanding how I work as a person. I took mindfulness to a whole new level and focused my energy in understanding myself, and separating my conscious thoughts from my emotional thinking process. This was also the time when I learnt to accept what life would mean for me.

I’m not saying I can’t live a “normal” life or that anyone with bipolar disorder has huge limitations to how they can live, but after gaining a better understanding of myself I knew a corporate career would be out of the question. The lack of control and high need to be socially smart would be too stressful for me; making me vulnerable to a depressive episode.

The most important point is the rigidness of my schedule if I went into corporate. The lack of control over my time would make my sleep quality drop faster than a jet breaking the sound barrier. 

Right now, I record my sleeping patterns but make minimal effort in controlling it and this plays a big part on regulating my stress levels. I never actively start regulating my sleep until it goes beyond anything acceptable like sleeping for less than 4 hours or for more than 12 hours.

My sleeping patterns naturally fluctuate throughout the year and if I was to attempt at keeping a rigid regime I would suffer the consequences towards my mental health. The active effort made to sleep on time or wake up on time seems to amplify any sleeping problems I have. It makes me feel more tired or restless.

But by making money online, I’m lucky enough to work whenever it suits me best. I’m no longer being paid by clocking in or clocking out, but solely based on my results. That means I can work for one hour a day, or start work after lunch and it doesn’t matter. This gives me the luxury to let my body stay in tune with it’s natural sleeping needs.

Technically you could do this with a brick and mortar business as well, but for someone who doesn’t have a huge sum of money to buy a successful franchise licence and a whole army of staff, then an offline business just isn’t an option. An online business however, is considerably cheaper. I started my first online business with only $100 USD.

That’s not to say I didn’t inject more capital into it, but $100 was all it took for me to set everything up and have my doors open for business. You can’t even open a simple hawker stall in Hong Kong for $100 USD, and I had a fully functional store in one of internet’s biggest retail platforms.

But apart from the low initial investment needed, the online world is 24/7. That means there’s a big opportunity to leverage technology to make sales around the clock even if I don’t actively work around the clock. What I’m talking about is passive income. I discovered the beauty of passive income by chance from my Etsy business after I noticed sales were becoming consistent even after doing zero marketing while on holiday.

It instantly clicked in my head that this was the true answer to how I can live the life I want. Since then, I’ve been jumping head first in everything I can learn about making passive income online. The idea of having a recurring stream of income without trading my time for it was so attractive to me. Knowing my monthly income would be relatively stable even if I wasn’t, totally blew my mind.

Passive income would mean my living arrangement, lifestyle and anything else directly affected by my financial situation wouldn’t be sensitive towards my bipolar disorder. I no longer had to worry about the mountain of depressing statistics about how bipolar sufferers tend to earn up to 48% less than their peers, or other research results about how bipolar disorder makes it hard for sufferers to keep any job for long.

Which brings me to another big reason why making money online is the best solution for me. The diversity and novelty involved with making money online is huge. There’s just so many ways to generate money online as long as you’re willing to think outside the box of conventional thought. And anyone who has bipolar disorder will tell you that we definitely have our moments of unconventional thought.

The entrepreneurial aspects required to create and manage passive income plays to all the characteristics of a bipolar high. And although I try my best to maintain myself in a neutral position, highs and lows are inevitable. So instead of beating myself up for the highs and lows, why not change it to my advantage and fully embrace all the positives of the highs and limit the damage of the lows.

They don’t call bipolar disorder the “CEO disease” for nothing. A disproportionate number of CEOs have bipolar disorder and it seems to be linked towards an extreme polarized range with career success. Many either underperform in the bottom percentile of society or overperform and land in the top percentile. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle with anything related to bipolar disorder. But there’s good reason for this trend when looking at normal jobs and careers.

All the negative inconveniences of bipolar make keeping a job or following a rigid structure hard for many to ever successfully build wealth or progress at a normal pace in a corporate career. While all the positive perks of bipolar makes us great in leadership positions in higher managerial roles. All this means is, where we land on this extreme bell curve is highly dependent on luck. Since we’re ultimately not in control to when these highs and lows happen.

But what if we can control what we do during these highs and lows? Such as deciding when we work and how we work. That’s exactly what working online gives me. It gives me the freedom to take advantage of my natural mood cycles to do my best work. I admittedly do my best work when I’m feeling extra motivated, creative and optimistic. I get a lot of work done during these moments and the quality is always great. It’s the complete opposite when I’m on the other end of my bipolar though, but I don’t need to drag myself to work during those times, instead I can slow down or completely stop and take care of myself.

I know my solution isn’t the only solution to living with bipolar disorder and there are millions of others that have figured their own unique ways of living a fulfilling life. But if you’re currently still looking for a possible solution, then maybe online passive income is the answer you should explore. It’s freed up my own life and given me the chance to think about the long term future. I now have the confidence to plan a life knowing my environment doesn’t have to fluctuate along with me.

Other resources that you should check out:

• Learn how I manage my bipolar depression 
• Start your own Kindle publishing business by learning with the best course in the industry
• Discover the many methods to make passive income. I created the internets longest list of passive income methods
• Learn how to take the first steps to creating your dream life with this guide.