There are various home business options to choose from, each providing certain liberties that may not be possible to get from the office environment. Here are just a few ways in which a home business can make your life easier.

Staying At Home With Kids

This may be the biggest benefit of running your own home business. The expense involved in sending your children to day care can be completely eliminated. Although some work-at-home parents still choose to keep their children in daycare in order to get more work done during the day, the option of eliminating day care is possible.

Transportation

Operating your own home business eliminates the need for you to sit in traffic each day as you commute back and forth to work. You will spend less time in your car and more time doing the things that you enjoy most. The mileage on your car will be reduced and you can save money on gas.

Tax Deductions

If you own your own home business, you are able to take advantage of many tax deductions that those working in an office are not able to take. Although the savings only occur once a year, the amount you save each year may be quite substantial.

No Boss To Have To Answer To

Being your own boss is always an incentive when owning your own home business. You decide the hours that you want to work, when you want to take a vacation, and the manner in which you would like your home business run. You have complete control.

Cost Reductions

Owning your own home based business can be less costly than owning a brick and mortar business. Using your home as your office space instead of buying or leasing a building is a great way to keep more money in your pocket.

The Joe in question isn’t me. It’s a good friend of mine.

Born in squalor, raised in need, and oppressed by his neighbors, he fought tooth and nail to survive the slums, enter a good university- and now, runs a multitude of companies.

These aren’t your run of the mill single proprietorships. These are mid scale corporations with 100 to 500 dedicated employees. Each one radiates the zest he does.

We had a long talk over Coke Light last night (yep, beer’s no good for powerhouses) and I discovered we both lived by similar principles. These tenets helped us survive the tumult of life:

– You can’t be everything to everybody

– Don’t waste time befriending mad dogs.

– Admit there is no perfection, but strive for it nonetheless.

– Never underestimate the delight of real simplicity in lifestyle.

– Avoid unecessary complications.

– Consider first what is worth fighting for.

– Focus your mind on the pleasant aspects of life.

– Concentrate on things that can enhance your situation.

– Forget what is irrevocably painful or ugly.

– Frustration paralyzes efficiency. Ditch it.

– When you feel like a loser, look back at all those shining moments. There’s no such thing as a loser.

– Never procrastinate- cut through the chase and get things done. Or you’ll suffer tomorrow.

– Realize that men aren’t created equal. That’s a fact. But we all deserve equal opportunities.

– There will always be leaders and followers. Not everyone can be president.

– There is no cut and dried formula for success. Run for the hills when someone sells you one.

and here’s one thing I realized after I graduated college:

– Success isn’t an accident. It’s a choice.

Let me tell you something. Every action, thought, and emotion you entertain ultimately shapes your future. Since you made it to the end of this article, I know you’re committed to creating the good life for yourself. You can begin right now by deciding to make the right choices.

Every time.

Let us renew our hope in humanity. It’s so easy to lose faith when someone cuts us off on the highway, when a ‘friend’ blows us off (for the second time) and fails to show, when we get burned in a business deal, when a co-worker doesn’t do what they said they were going to do, or when a colleague fails to keep their promise, etc.

At the same time, we DO encounter people showing heroic acts of kindness in our day-to-day lives. I’m talking about the simple things. In my case, there have been many examples:

* When I was running in the pouring rain, without an umbrella, wearing a spiffy suit, on my way to a meeting, a kind lady (a stranger) offered me her umbrella, gave me her address, and trusted I would return it when the rain died down.

* One day I had left my clothes in the Laundromat’s drying machine. When I returned to get my clothes, I was expecting a big piled-up heap of clothes to be thrown on the table, as usual. But this one time, some stranger had neatly folded ALL of my clothes right down to the socks and put it in a neat little pile beside the drying machine.

* I had lost a very nice leather-bound binder that was as good as new and would have made a really nice accessory. A couple days later I got a kind note from a stranger saying they had found my binder and that they would keep it in a safe place until I picked it up.

These random acts of kindness prove that people have an enormous capacity for good. I’m sure we’ve all seen this in action during the wake of the Tsunami disaster where so many Tsunami Heroes rose to the occasion risking their own lives to help save the lives of others.

And yet, when people don’t meet our standards of proper conduct and common courtesy, it can sometimes be so easy to lose hope, become bitter, and develop a hardened heart. I myself had an unspoken rule that came down to: “three strikes and your out.”

It was pretty ruthless when I think back. Although I didn’t follow that rule right down to the letter, it was pretty close. So if someone failed to come through for me three times in a row (didn’t show up for a meeting or came really late, failed to honor their word, or kept avoiding an important issue that needed to be addressed) they were basically ‘cut-off’ from my life. Needless to say, I lost a lot of friends (and business) that way.

Life is not a baseball game. Life is life. It’s an unsolved mystery. We need to renew our hope in humanity and embrace people with a wider-vision of who they are so they can eventually expand and grow to fill that space. If we don’t give people much space we will continually be disappointed as people keep coming short of our expectations.

It is far better to make the extra effort to look for the good, to look for the Buddha within, than to look for the bad. Nelson Mandela could have come out of jail a very bitter man. Yet he CHOSE to hope! Here is an excerpt from my book, Psychology of the Hero Soul, which illustrates the point:

“Nelson Mandela, a man who suffered years of cruelty and injustice in the hands of his enemies, was still able to see a ray of hope in humanity. In his autobiography, he wrote: ‘I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or is religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than it’s opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to the limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.'”

Let us renew our hope in humanity. And if we are to err, let us err on the side of compassion, generosity, and tolerance.