What are you good at? What are you interested in, passion about, and what really turns you on when it comes to work and life? Find a good match between your personal drives and interests and your home based business can mean the difference between success and struggle.
I think that one of the differences between working a more traditional job and starting a home based business is that it is even more important to make sure you have a good match. After all, when you take a “traditional” job working for a company or someone else, you can always leave relatively easily if it does not work out. With your own home business, you are much more vested–often both financially and with your heart and soul–and it might be harder to extricate yourself from something that is not a great match.
What are you really interested in? Are there some things you want to learn how to do or be great at? I do think that wanting to learn new things and develop additional skills can be a great motivator for a home business, but there needs to be some balance. What if you discover you are not that great at what you had hoped to do? Will you be willing to continue working at it or will you lose interest if it gets to be “too hard”? Can you give yourself enough time for a decent learning curve or will you feel the pressure if you have chosen something that is too far outside your comfort zone?
Finally, I think we need to ask ourselves if our home businesses will actually get us closer to our work and life goals or if they will take us further away. This can be a hard thing to think about and it involves being able to focus on the long term instead of just the immediate future. What works for us in the next year or two (while we are at home with an infant or young child, for example) should also be moving us toward our longer-term goals so that we are not sacrificing dreams, security, interests, etc.
Also: Are You Interested in a Relevant Business?