I'm at an amusement park with my kids, in the middle of the week, and I'm on a conference call while I watch my son try to get on a ride.

Being self-employed looks so nice at an amusement park. The self-employed are always free to go on a vacation. They pick up their friends at the airport in the middle of the day, they show up for poker night because they can stay out late, and they can plan their wedding without having to pretend they are working.

Close up, though, most self-employed people are completely stressed about money.

That money part is what I hate about being self-employed. Anyone who says they don’t love a steady paycheck is lying. A paycheck is so nice. It’s reliable like a friend, it makes you safe, it gives you a way to organize your life.

Here's how I deal with the worrying:

1. Pretend you have an out.
Sometimes I have to calm myself down by telling myself I'll solve my money problems by taking a regular job. One fantasy I have is getting a job at Microsoft. Once I was giving a speech at a human resource convention in Seattle. And a top HR guy from Microsoft was there. And he wanted to talk to me.

I thought, “Great, I’ll sell him something from Brazen Careerist.”

Then I thought, "No. I just want a job." I thought I'd do anything—even read resumes all day—if he’d just give me a steady paycheck and access to the amazing health care they give autistic kids of employees.

I hear Microsoft is ending that insurance plan. I wonder if this will help me stay more focused on running my own company instead of looking for escape routes. Probably not.

2. Forget living in the moment. Instead, live five months in the future.
Your clients will take too long to make a decision, no matter how long they take, and they will never pay immediately. So instead of fighting the lag-time, you should always be earning money for five months out. If you are spending your days trying to drum up business to get revenue five months from now, you feel safe, knowing that it’s not an emergency. Any closer than that and you feel like if you don’t close you’re gonna die.

3. The only way to feel rich is to be able to dump an awful client.
Thinking five months out frees you to dump a client, and it's so so fun to dump a client who misbehaves. It’s a way to assert your power as a freelancer even though you have no power because if you don’t get money you’ll starve and have to get a staff job somewhere (and you probably can’t – because most self-employed people are largely unmanageable in a corporate hierarchy).

I had a client that signed a contract to pay half up front, and then didn’t. And the company was so late it was almost time to give the speech. And I said, if you don’t pay this week, I’m not doing the speech. I loved that. I loved that because I don’t need the money from the speech. I’m okay for right now. Well, I mean, I’d really like the money this week. But I’m okay for next week, so I liked telling her to fuck off.

4. Have one great client.
You need a lot of schemes. You have to always be pitching different people different stuff because you don’t know what’ll stick. But you really need one client that is great, and pays on time, and makes you love doing your job. That client gives you sanity.

For me that is Federated Media. Really, I could write a whole post about how much I love them. They are so easy to work with and they sell ads that I’d never sell on my own, because I’d get impatient and tell the advertiser to fuck off before I collected any money. So Federated makes my life great, because I can blog about anything and say yes or no to anything and they just roll with it, and keep selling ads. Well, they did tell me to remove the word fuck from a post. But that’s how you know that Federated didn’t pay me to write this post. Because they allow pretty much anything except obscenities, which they say fuck qualifies as.

5. Self-employment stability requires doing stuff you hate.
Be a grown-up. Self-employed doesn’t mean you love everything you do. I have done stuff to appease editors that drove me crazy. I have given speeches to groups of people that were all at the conference with the sole purpose of cheating on their wives. I do lots of stuff I don’t like. I remind myself that I do it so that I can have a job that I pretty much love.

To cope with the bad stuff, you have to find a way to trick yourself. Like, I don’t love the pressure, but I love writing about the pressure.

At first, it was just a hint of being snowed in, people stopping and talking in the grocery store. Not that I would know. Because the farmer told me I should probably go buy extra food in case we’re snowed in and I ignored him. Melissa and I were too busy scheming, figuring out how we can do a business together. Finding a good idea for a business takes a lot of thinking, and arguing, and diagramming failed ideas on big sheets of paper.

Then it started snowing. A lot. At first it was fun. School got out early so the farm kids could get home before the roads were unpassable. Unpassable spellchecks as not-a-word, and my editor hates that, but I swear that’s what they call snowed-in roads in the country.

The blizzard was fun. I tucked in my goats and then my kids and then Melissa, who is from Texas, needed extra layers and long underwear to sleep. I told myself it was okay that I was getting no work done. Some days are like that. All days cannot be equally productive. And anyway, I'm an ENTJ, so I'm happy as long as I'm taking charge of something—starting a company, running a family—so as long as people follow my goal, I'm just fine.

When we woke up, the blistering wind made the house feel cozy warm. I showed the kids how to build obstacle courses through their bedroom and we invented recipes for cookies that sometimes came out right.

We baked and baked until we ran out of the sprinkles.

Then I started sneaking glances through my in-box between movies that I warned the kids were too gruesome to watch. But that was before it was a snow day.

The farmer does not take snow days well. He is an ISTP, which means he's great with a snow plow and most other machinery and he almost never calls for help. So I knew the snow drifts were really high when the farmer had to wait for some other guy who has a bigger plow to come clear the snow. Another thing about an ISTP: they crave action-oriented tasks. So the farmer spent a lot of time outside, walking through the cold, longing for the more regular rhythms of the farm.

The next day there was no snow falling, but the snow piles were six feet high. Melissa is an INTJ. She needs to build systems to improve stuff, but it's hard to be organized with stir-crazy boys, freezing animals, and a too-soon depleted pantry. But, proving that all personality types find their true-to-self way of working from home, Melissa spent the day calling airlines, switching tickets, telling agents that a snowstorm is a reason for a refund. And when she finished with her own tickets, she started rearranging for her friends.

Finally, the snowplow guy arrived and transformed the barren landscape to a winter playground. And while you'd expect me to take my kids outside with me, I can't think unless I have alone time. It's my favorite part of working from home, in fact. That I can be alone whenever I want. Except on a snow day.

One of the most important requirements for a successful home office is staying stimulated—making sure we experience new things all the time. So I slipped outside without a word to the kids, and tested the terrain.

Photos by Melissa Sconyers.

1. Get a spot where you can concentrate.
So I tried working from home, but then I started feeling like I am the most alone person in the world. So I thought I’d change it up a little; I’d work from home, but the farmer’s home.

I call him to tell him I’m coming to his house early.

“How early?” he asks.

“Now.”

“Don’t you have to work today?”

“I’m not going to the office any more. I don’t want to talk to people.”

There is a beat of silence, and I think the farmer is going to say something. Or maybe the silence is long enough that he is thinking I am going to talk. He has asked me to not talk over him, but I have a hard time telling if it is his turn to talk or mine. I start to panic because the rhythm of conversation is getting irregular, so I say, “Okay. Bye.” And I hang up before he can say anything else. I note to myself that this is the fourth conversation in a row that I did not talk over him.

I stop at the gas station by his house. I have enough gas to get to his house, but not enough gas to get lost and get to his house, which shouldn’t happen, but if it did, it would be bad because I still do not have a winter coat. I am not sure why I don’t have a winter coat. I think it is because it’s so cold that I can’t stand being outside for more than five or ten seconds. So if I’m only going to be outside for a few seconds then I don’t need a coat. The farmer keeps telling me how dangerous it is to travel without a winter coat. I show him I’m paying attention to the dangers of the cold by being sure to not run out of gas on a remote country road.

2. Have close proximity to a coffee source.
I get to his house. I put my stuff down in the kitchen and I make coffee.

The farmer comes in. He kisses me hello. Then he wipes up where I spilled water by the coffee maker. At one point, we had an argument about his wiping up around me all the time.

“I never wipe the table at dinner where you spill,” I said.

“What?” he said. “Are you kidding? I never spill.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t. You spill almost every time you do anything in the kitchen. That is not normal.”

“I spill more than other people?”

“Yes. Adults don’t spill.”

Once he told me this, I noticed that I actually spill something every meal. Sometimes two or three times. I never noticed that other people don’t do it until the farmer told me. So now, him wiping up the water on the counter feels intimate: he knows me so well.

3. Have good food, fast Internet, and a sofa for avoiding both.
He tells me that he is in the middle of moving pigs, and he’ll come back to the house for lunch.

I want to ask him if he's working on getting an Internet connection because if I'm going to work from home from his home, I need Internet. But he always feels like I’m pushing, and then he pushes back. So I decide to ask him while he’s eating lunch. He is easier to talk to if he’s walking or eating and it’s too cold to walk outside.

I lie on the farmer’s sofa and think. The fields are white and rolling, with bits of old corn stalks poking out. The cattle are far off, almost at the horizon: brown dots moving slowly to yellow dots of hay. I stare out the window long enough that the farmer drives by on the tractor. Stops at the barn. Pets the donkey. Comes in for lunch.

Since this is an impromptu visit, there is no food to eat except beef. That’s all he keeps in his house. Well, beef and Frosted Flakes and Dora the Explorer cookies, from the last time that I came here with my kids.

He cooks hamburgers for us.

He tells me he did not notch the pigs' ears in the last litter because he was so distracted dealing with me. He tells me he has never had a litter of pigs unnotched. Ever. Unnotched is not his word. It’s mine. I forget the word he uses.

4. Have a notebook for ideas that you save for when you’re with people.
Then he sits down to lunch and I try to not bring up difficult stuff to talk about because I can see that he is already unhinged that the pigs are unnotched.

But after three bites I cannot hold back: “I have a list of things we need to do so I can move into your house.”

He looks at me. Puts his fork down. Takes a deep breath. “Let’s see it.”

“I have to read it to you.”

He looks. It’s in shorthand. Not regular shorthand but the shorthand I invented to take notes at school because the way I got through school was by memorizing every lecture word for word and then regurgitating it to teachers on essay tests.

I find that my shorthand is also good for writing private notes to myself. Now I can have my list out, at the table, but the farmer cannot read it so I can tell him only the amount of things I think he can handle without going nuts over how hard it is for me to move to his house.

I tell him, “Well. The Internet. That’s an easy one.”

He picks up his fork. Takes a bite. “Okay. What else?”

“The heating has to work.”

“Okay. We have to talk about that. About what it means to you to be working.”

“Okay. Let’s talk about that now.”

“First, tell me what else is on the list.”

“Not that much.”

“What do you mean not that much? I see you have crazy writing down the whole page. That looks long.”

He’s right.

I tell him it’s a secret.

He shakes his head and laughs.

I tell myself I have to develop a shorthand sign for manure, because I need him to not put it so close to the house. I think it’s causing a problem with flies. Which I already have a shorthand sign for because I had a history professor who always used the phrase “flies in the face of . . . .”

5. Find balance: Calm/exciting, chatter/quiet, people/no people.
After lunch we sit on the sofa and talk about grazing. He is thinking of grazing pigs with cattle this summer. People don’t usually do it. He is not sure how he wants to manage it. He likes to have interesting projects on the farm. He is curious and likes the quirky edge of farm life. But he is always trying to figure out how to balance his curiosity with his need for stability.

He says, “Okay. I have to go back out now.”

I say, “Five more minutes.”

He says, “You’re having a hard time transitioning to work, aren’t you?”

He says, “Do you want me to lie on top of you?”

I nod yes.

So I lie on the sofa and he puts the cushions on top of me and then lies on top of the cushions, and the pressure from the cushions is like a big squeeze without the social input of feeling a person as well.

The farmer discovered this trick by reading Temple Grandin's technique for working with cattle. It works with me, too.

Then he leaves and starts sorting pigs, and I sit down at the table and start writing.

Nineteen years later I thought, I like to write, I should get paid for this.

So I went to graduate school for writing, and the first day, the teacher said, "If any of you can imagine yourselves doing anything but writing, you should do that. Writing is hard, and lonely and full of rejection and you'll never make any money."

I stayed in school (I had a fellowship – who can give up free money?) but after school I got a job in marketing at a Fortune 500 company. And I made a lot of money.

But I kept writing. For ten more years. I wrote after work, and when my jobs were slow, I wrote at work. I used my vacation time to send writing to publishers who rejected me. But then they stopped rejecting me. And slowly, I realized that I could support my family with my writing. So I took the leap. (And, note, a huge salary cut.)

If you think you want to be a writer, first pay heed to my teacher's advice. If you still want to write, remember that most writers spend years and years writing before they get published in a national magazine. So keep your day job until you're sure you won't starve. Here are three other things to do as well:

1. Rethink your ideas about time and space.
The best way to build up a freelancing career is to have another job with a steady paycheck, to support you while you're honing your skills as a freelancer. This means that you need to be able to write in small, disjointed spurts of time, because you have a day job, and responsibilities, and you don't have three days to craft each sentence.

But maybe you've already quit your day job as an expression of commitment to the freelancing. That's fine, but maybe you don't have a lot of money. Writers do not need their own pristine office and gorgeous PowerBook. I wrote for years on my kitchen counter because our New York City apartment didn't have room for a desk. It wasn't great, but it was fine.

2. Accept self-promotion as a way of life.
No one likes to do self-promotion, but the people who really, really want to work for themselves force themselves to be good at it. There is no one to get work for you except you. And it takes a lot of time to get the word out about what you do and why you do it well.

There are a ton of freelancers who can do a competent job at any given job. The freelancer who gets the work is the one who is best at marketing herself. So don't talk about the injustice of the world and how you are too much of an artist to promote yourself. Instead, set aside 40% of your day for self-marketing. I used to think that as I got to be a better writer I would do less self-promoting. But in fact, it never happens, as far as I can tell. It's forty percent forever.

3. Give up the notion that there's one, perfect way to do it.
Not that the perfect word doesn't exist. But it's in the eye of the beholder. Who, in this case, is your editor. But look, you're not writing the next Magna Charta. Maybe you're writing a how-to piece for a men's magazine. Or, if you're lucky, you're writing some travel piece about a hotel that's giving you free lodging. What I'm saying here is that the stuff you're writing isn't so precious that the editor can't rip it to shreds and rewrite it in his voice.

So what? You still get a check. You still get to say you were published in that magazine. Don't write for that editor again if it's so upsetting to you. But remember that the best money does not come from the best assignments, and there's a reason for that.

So be flexible. I have found that when I took assignments that I didn't like, I still learned a lot, even if the editor didn't love my word choice. Focus on the learning, and the side benefit will be that you'll have better relationships with editors. For a freelancer, the steady work comes from a combination of good work and good relationships.

Other posts from "A Week in Journalism" series:

Why do journalists misquote everyone (and how I met my husband)

How to move from print journalism to online journalism

Seven ways to get an agent's attention (by my agent, Susan Rabiner)

After years of thinking I should do this but not really doing it, I finally took action. I talked about my deduction plan with Anne-Marie Fisher, director of tax services for CBIZ.

Here's a transcript of our conversation:

Me: "I spent a lot of money on expensive eye cream so that I looked good for my Yahoo! photo. Can I deduct that?"

Anne: "They don't like cosmetics or clothing that they say you could use outside of your article."

Me: "But I wouldn't have had to look that good if I didn't take the photo."

Anne: "But you looked good after the photo. The IRS is really tough on things that help your appearance."

Me: "What if the cream made me look bad?"

Read the column at Yahoo! Finance

These companies give new opportunities to entrepreneurs to get started with no money down. But a virtual business also gives people the opportunity to create the personal life they want. "The future is likely to be the age of virtual businesses," writes Anita Campbell, founder of Small Business Trends. "Forget three guys in a garage that was your father's startup. Today it's three people spread out across the country or even across continents, each in their home offices or back porches with laptops, mobile phones, and WiFi."

Pamela Slim, who blogs at Escape From Cubicle Nation, says there is a "perfect storm" of factors converging to make virtual businesses more popular, and easier to start:

1. Workers will quit regular jobs to get control over their time.
Both men and women are increasingly willing to leave the work force to create personal time and family time, according to Jacqueline Luffman, a labor analyst for the government of Canada. In light of that, a virtual office ends up seeming like a compromise rather than an extreme solution.

2. Technology levels the playing field.
It has become so cheap and easy to use that someone who doesn't have a lot of resources can create a web presence that looks established and professional.

3. Retail businesses can be virtual.
Of course, there's always eBay. But you can also set up a shop with Amazon, where you create a storefront (which could even be a blog) and Amazon handles all inventory and fulfillment issues — and then sends you a check for the sales you make. Or you can work with a slew of smaller online wholesalers the same way.

4. The rise of telecommuting.
Established companies such as Sun Microsystems realize that telecommuters are happy, appreciative and cost-effective, so they encourage people to telecommute. Smart companies provide essential training and support so workers are productive at home from the start. The side effect is that location-based companies are training workers on how to set up their own virtual companies.

This trend means that it's easier for you to have a work life that you can control – whether you're working at your own virtual company or at someone else's. The benefits are flexibility, efficiency and little overhead. The drawback is that time management is difficult, and not everyone can adapt.

Dennis Yang works at Techdirt, a virtual company that provides daily news and analysis to corporate clients. While Yang does not sit with co-workers, he is never lonely. He typically has about seven conversations going on at any one time on his computer screen, and he can work anywhere he wants — for example, his grandmother's living room.

A typical day involves constant instant messaging, occasional emails with clients, and Skype for Internet-based phone calls, which are free – though Yang adds, "We don't like to have phone conversations because it's difficult to have more than one at a time."

Techdirt's 14 employees hang out in a virtual conference room, which is really a chat room, and when the once-a-week phone call happens, someone types in the chat room that it's time to move to the conference call.

Not surprisingly, members of Generation Y populate many of the virtual companies. "The younger generation is very attracted by the virtual companies because they are used to it. Skype and IM are normal to them, and it is not weird to work with people you rarely see when most of your friends are people you rarely see." says Chris Yeh, co-chair of the Founders Forum for entrepreneurs, and founder of his own company, Targetfirst.

But virtual companies have a lot to offer Generation X as well: "We want a career that gives us control over our schedule and our life," says Yeh. "I want a work environment where I can also focus on my kids. Working from
home is not a panacea for everything because the kids take time and they are always calling for you, but at least there's no commute time."

The virtual business community is huge, so there's room for everyone. In fact a whole economy has developed in which virtual companies do business with other virtual companies. Sharon Sarmiento, founder of Streamline Virtual Office Solutions, offers project-based, administrative assistance to companies that do not need a physical presence. So it is no surprise that a major client is Andy Wibbels, the king of promoting blog-based businesses.

For some people, such as Yang, virtual companies present a continual mix of work life and personal life where neither begins or ends. For others, such as Yeh and Sarmiento, a virtual company is a way to discover optimal methods for dividing a day.

Last week Sarmiento was experimenting with a four-hour workday. "I'm trying to be really productive," she says, and then defines what she means by that in a blog post aimed at helping other virtual entrepreneurs manage their time. "You cannot work harder," she advises, it's more about prioritizing. "Just turn off the computer at the end of four hours. This experiment is almost entirely psychological."

It might seem that in the land of virtual companies, in a virtual economy, there is virtually no work getting done. But Yang and Sarmiento both exemplify the work ethic that typifies virtual offices.

"In a small company where people know each other and are dedicated to a cause or a calling, you can count on everyone to be productive," says Yeh. But even a technology cheerleader such as Yeh doesn't foresee a workplace devoid of stupid meetings and wasteful schedules. "The virtual office can cut down on the BS," he says, "but BS is part of human nature."

1. You don't need a venture capitalist, you are the venture capitalist.
Today, you can make something people want without spending money. Technology is simple enough to use that you don't need to pay for high-end software to get a business off the ground. If you can figure out how to pay for food and lodging (hello, mom and dad) then you can fund your own startup.

2. For a killer marketing plan make a list of your friends.
"Businesses these days are built on word of mouth," says Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches. You know 200 people. Send them an email telling them about your business. If it's great, word of mouth will generate a customer base. If your business isn't great, you'll know right away.

This can be true offline as well. Daniela Corte started with an even smaller base than 200. She gave five friends custom-fitted pants. "I wanted this pair of pants to be their favorite pair," she says. And it worked. After interviewing the friends about fit and texture preferences, Corte created pants that were buzz worthy, and she grew a multi-national business from those first five women raving about their pants.

3. Globalization is good for you.
As long as your needs are well defined, hiring a programmer in India is a great way to save money. When Katherine Lee wanted to create a database of yarns for her business Sweaterbabe.com, she paid an Indian programmer $250 – a significantly lower price than US developers would have charged.

But you have to know what you're doing when you outsource to India. If you're looking for someone to hold your hand and teach you about online design, forget it. But you can pay the online design maven her US rates and then send the design plan to the guy in India to execute.

4. You only need to master a small niche.
Google makes searching so effective that customers with a very specific interest can find businesses with a very specific interest – at such a high rate that niche businesses are more viable than ever before. This is the premise of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which encourages entrepreneurs to focus on the small areas of the world that are neglected by big retailers because the market is not big enough.

And Fox points out that everyone knows a lot about something, so the best place in the long tail to start experimenting is where you have a good deal of specialized knowledge – which is likely to be a niche.

5. You don't need a widget, you can sell yourself.
The idea of an Internet startup is to grow an audience first, and then figure out how to make money. So a logical place to turn to is yourself, because if you can build an audience, then you're an expert in something.

At the sprightly age of 24, Ramit Sethi writes the very popular personal finance blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com. He has parlayed this success into a public speaking career (seriously – Fortune 500 companies are paying him to come talk to employees about finance) and a book-writing career (stay tuned for his advice on how to recruit hotshots like him to your company).

6. You don't have to quit your day job.
Jessa Crispin did not set out to start a business. She was just writing books reviews and posting them on her web site, Bookslut. The reviews were so popular that eventually she was able to quit her job and make Bookslut her fulltime job. But she built the business while working at another job.

Of course, not everyone is a genius on the first try like Crispin. But Fox points out, "The feedback loop is short. So you can try several different things to see what works." The trick is to recognize when your idea is going nowhere before you've sunk too much time into it.

7. Entrepreneurship is about choosing a lifestyle.
Most entrepreneurs don't start a business to get rich, they start a business so they can live the life they want. Maybe they want to be creative, maybe they want to do what they're passionate about, increasingly, they want to have flexibility to manage their own workday.

When Corte had a baby she realized that her current business model with daily fittings was too time-intensive. So she moved her retail business to online in order to continue to be able to offer her clothes direct to consumers but to regain time for her daughter.

8. You don't need to wait to cash out.
The 1980s brought us real estate flipping; the new millennium brings us web site flipping. Not only are people auctioning their companies on eBay for denominations formerly reserved for successful garage sales, but there are more than 70 Internet locations where people are buying and selling web sites 24 hours a day.

Tom Kuegler, partner at New Concept Factory, runs an incubator that is starting eight Internet companies each quarter. He estimates that most of these companies he'll "unload at a low price" and two out of twenty-four will grow into "super companies." If this sounds pie-in-the-sky to you, consider that Kuegler is no neophyte. He's been starting and selling Internet companies since 1994.

9. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, and you can change the world.
This idea comes from eighteen-year-old Ben Casnocha, who founded Comcate, a leading software company for governments, when he was twelve years old. Yep. That's right. Twelve years old.

Casnocha says, "Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with business but it is a way of thinking about things that everyone can do: Seeing individuals as empowered as agents of change; Trying to figure out the status quo, the normal thing, and then thinking about what we can do differently. If more people thought like entrepreneurs the world could be a better place."

As with all decision points, the way to make the best choice is to know yourself. If you get bored easily, do a lot of different jobs. If you are a type-A hyperachiever, do one business really, really well. If you have a small tolerance for risk, keep a full-time job while you explore other options. All are great ways to make the shift to working for yourself.

One of the most interesting recipes for self-employment comes from self-employment evangelist Barbara Winter. Winter says that it's easier to have five jobs that generate $10,000 a year than it is to have one job that generates $50,000 a year – the perfect scenario for opening an eBay business, renting out a room in your condo, writing press releases for your friend's startup, etc.

This is, essentially, juggling five jobs, but Winter's book describes ways of making it seem manageable: "The juggler walks out on the stage with ten sticks and ten plates, but doesn't begin spinning them all at once. Methodically, the juggler positions the first plate on a stick and gets it into motion. Once done, the juggler moves on to the next, then the next, and so forth. Eventually, all ten of the plates are spinning away, each with its own momentum." (This is how I feel about blogging – it's like throwing another plate in the air for me.)

If you have spent some time in the workforce, consider becoming a consultant, which essentially is making a single, focused business out of yourself. "You should have at least five years of workplace experience before you go on your own," says Laurie Young, founder of Flexible Resources, "because you are offering your experience." Also, you need marketing skills to sell yourself. It takes a certain kind of talent "to show people you have skills they can use."

Find a market niche that you can dominate. Otherwise there is no way to distinguish yourself from all the other consultants, no way to stand out. (Two good books on this: Small is the New Big, and The Long Tail.) Young did this herself, as a recruiter. She is a headhunter for people who want flexible jobs (she herself job shares the CEO position at Flexible Resources). If she were a more typical headhunter, she would not stand out above the crowd as well.

Alexandra Levit worked in public relations for Computer Associates and then struck out on her own, as a consultant in publicity and marketing communications. In terms of making the transition, Levit advises that you "try lining up a few jobs that you can have before you take the leap," and be prepared to spend "about 30% of your time marketing yourself."

Levit provides a snapshot of reality for all entrepreneurs when she says, "Don't expect the drawbacks to be only financial. You need a lot of self-discipline to sit down in your home office and work without any external pressure. Working for yourself means you're responsible for every aspect of the business," and this means, ironically, even some of the annoying tasks you were trying to avoid by working for yourself.

Laurie Young is a founder of Flexible Resources, a company that specializes in finding flextime jobs for people, and she spends her days convincing employers to create innovative positions. You will probably have to do some convincing as well.

It makes sense: You'd never ask for a raise without presenting competitive salary analysis, and you should do the same when asking for flextime. Fortunately, there is a lot of research to present because many companies offer flextime, and it actually helps those companies because flextime is a cheap and effective tool to boost employee morale.

But keep in mind that flexible schedules aren't available to people who get the job done. Flextime is generally only offered to overperformers. So be one.

About ten years ago, British management guru Charles Handy predicted that people would replace the idea of one, full-time job, with several different part-time occupations. He called this the "portfolio career," and Karo provides a good example of how this trend is taking shape.

A portfolio career is not the same thing as holding down three bad jobs and wishing you could figure out what to do with yourself. Rather, it is a scheme you pursue purposefully and positively, as a way to achieve financial or personal goals or a mixture of both. This new type of career choice can include several highly skilled, professional posts, often mixing employment with self-employment, and volunteer work or learning work with fee-based work.

While there has been scattered adoption of the portfolio career among baby boomers, the idea is gaining a lot of traction among younger workers, even though they never use the term. The Electronic Recruiting Exchange reports that as many as a third of new workers are looking for alternatives to full-time employment. For people in their twenties and early thirties, a portfolio career is a means of self-discovery, hedging one's bets, and protecting their quality of life.

Most people have skills that cross into more than one profession. And if you take any one of the popular personality tests offered by web sites and career counselors you will find that peoples' personalities do not fit neatly into one type of profession either.

So the idea of having to choose one single profession is frequently unappealing. Ezra Zuckerman, associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told me, "A lot of people feel alienated when thy feel there is more to themselves that they have not shown [in their work]." Young people are particularly drawn to the idea of a career as a vehicle to fulfillment and self-actualization, so they are less apt than Handy's generation to settle into one, narrow career.

The arguments for a portfolio career at the beginning of one's adult life are clear. Professor of psychology at Harvard, Daniel Gilbert, told me that the best way to figure out what will make you happy is to try it. A portfolio career gives you the opportunity to try three or four types of work at the same time, and to keep switching out choices until you come up with a portfolio that you like.

Karo, for example, dropped the banking career when he stopped liking the daily suit-and-tie routine. And when I ask him when his next book is coming out, he hems and haws and it's clear that the career as an author is not so appealing – at least right now.

The trick in all career decisions is to figure out the intersection of your skills and your passions. This is an ongoing process, not a final destination, so a portfolio of part-time careers is more conducive to this path of discovery than a single, eight-hours-every-day career. Andrew Zacharakis, professor at Babson College told me, "Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. Your passion is likely to change over time but finding your passion is good practice. Part of the search for you passion should be a search to know what your skill set is. Ask parents, mentors, and friends. Try to mach skills you have with your passion."

The problem with a portfolio career is that you run the risk being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none – a problem in terms of both money and fulfillment.

"The most secure portfolio careers are with people who have a fairly solid skill base that people will pay for," says Ian Christie, career coach and author of the Bold Career blog. "You have to hang your hat on something. Either a functional skill, like accounting and you can be, say, a personal trainer at home. Or you need to find a market niche and provide a lot of services, such as training, development, outsource contracting, etcetera.

And you probably need a creative outlet in your portfolio. "When we are involved in creativity we feel that we are living more fully than in the rest of life," says, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. Any work can include creative thinking, but, he told me, "if you want to be creative then you must learn to do something well," To excel at something requires you to challenge yourself continually. Achieving high skill level at something is an important step toward fulfillment because, "most people want to think they have explored the limits of their potential."

Karo says he receives a lot of email from people asking how they can follow their creative dreams. And his advice is, appropriately, the Instant-message-length version of Handy's book-length theory: "You've gotta do it on the side. Diversify your revenue streams. Do what you're passionate about."