When a Passion Project Becomes Infrastructure

Ideas take time, and that's okay.

Not every asset starts as an investment.

Some start as a question.
In my case, it was a question that followed me for decades.

In the late 1980s, I read an article about astral projection. I was working nights behind a bar at the time, and the idea lodged itself somewhere permanent. I didn’t outline a book. I didn’t make a plan. I certainly wasn’t thinking about “digital assets.”

It was simply something that stayed with me.
Life moved. Jobs changed. Responsibilities stacked. The idea remained.

Years later, when I finally sat down and wrote Astral Rob, it wasn’t because I had calculated retirement projections. It was because I had carried the story long enough.

Only after it was finished did something shift.
I realized that the act of completing it had quietly changed its category.
It was no longer a private curiosity.

It was a published work.
It existed outside of me.
And because it existed, it had the potential to earn.

Not guaranteed income.
Not dramatic income.
Just potential.

That realization was subtle, but important.

We often think of retirement assets in purely financial terms: savings, investments, real estate, dividends. Those matter. But there’s another category that rarely gets discussed — completed knowledge.

Knowlege has value

An unfinished idea has emotional value.
A finished project has structural value.
It can be sold.

• Licensed.
• Expanded.
• Built upon.

It becomes infrastructure.

For me, that happened through fiction. But it doesn’t have to be fiction.
It could be a skill you’ve used for decades in your profession.
It could be a process you’ve refined that others struggle with.

It could be a niche hobby you know deeply.
A short eBook explaining something clearly.
A practical guide in PDF form.

A small, focused digital product that solves one specific problem.
A collection of lessons learned in an industry most people never see from the inside.
None of these need to be large. They need to be finished.

I didn’t write fiction to fund retirement. That wasn’t the origin. But once the work existed in published form, it joined the system I’m building. It became one more stream — however small — feeding into the larger river.

That was the “aha” moment.

Finishing something you’ve held back can transform it into an asset.
And if you’re building retirement intentionally, that matters.

If you dream it, you can build it

There may be things you’ve postponed for years — not because they weren’t valuable, but because they didn’t seem practical.

Sometimes the practicality appears only after completion.

If you’re curious what that decades-old idea eventually became, Astral Rob is now available as a published digital novella. It’s one of the digital assets I’ve added to this ongoing retirement experiment.

Infrastructure isn’t always built from spreadsheets.

Sometimes it’s built from things you finally decide to finish.

TTFN

Frank