Being your own boss is a beautiful thing. It throws your life in chaos and tests you as a man down to the core. You will muddle through darkness, alone, in search of something that is beyond your wildest expectations.

Perhaps the greatest discovery you will encounter along the way is: Freedom.

It is indescribable, but to obtain it, isn’t easy. In fact, it’s damn near impossible for most men to grasp ahold of.

The truth is, most men today are terrified to act as if they had no limits to their ability. When opportunity knocks and presents itself, answering the challenge and taking the call invites fear in the form of risk. It forces you to make sacrifices earlier on in life, and makes you accept the fact that this isn’t going to be as painless as every guru in the past has led you to believe.

Understand that there is no such thing as work, life, balance. There’s only work, life, choices!

If you want to know how to be your own boss, I will gladly tell you without sugar coating it. But first and foremost, there are no grand secrets on how to do this. You can spend a lifetime in search of keys to open the doors of super success. Yet, the only key out there that can unlock and open the door is well, you.

You can believe that “luck” plays a role in the success of others, and I will tell you with complete confidence, that’s just not the case. You certainly won’t find those types of excuses below, because all of them are bullshit and I won’t accept any of them! All of the things you think matter, truly don’t.

In reality, there is nothing hold you from back from reaching your greatest self, except for three letter word, you. It’s a tough pill to swallow for most.

Welcome to a unique kind of hell.

It’s full time or failure.

You must be willing to commit to yourself that you will never work for someone else again. It’s not an easy thing to do. In fact, it scares the hell out of most people. In a way, most give up their freedom in exchange for a false sense of security. I’m talking about a 9 to 5. Most call it job security or even a steady paycheck. In reality, your employer could tank tomorrow. They could introduce a massive cut back or lay off. Or perhaps your company gets bought out by a bigger business that decides to come on in and trim away all the fat: a.k.a. you.

Remember being your own boss is not a part-time job. It’s not like you can just sit by the beach all day and relax like they tell you and all of those damn business books. There are no workweeks in which you will put in only a few hours. If you’re truly serious about being your own boss, you will commit 100%. In reality, things like vacations, holidays, and birthdays are for poor people. When you say that to most people they act like your some kind of monster. Truthfully they don’t understand what kind of obsession high-performance businessman have for what they do. It’s completely foreign to them.

Understand that there is no such thing as job security in this world!

Jump without a parachute.

You must be willing to overcome fear. That means eliminating all your backup plans. In order to be your own boss, there must be no parachute. You will be seen as crazy, bizarre and perhaps even foolish by those around you. And that’s perfectly fine.

When you first start, you will feel incredibly weird straying from the social norm. Back when I first started I distinctively remember walking into a parking garage on a weekday that was virtually empty. The only car parked in there was mine. In that moment, the thought of doing something most people don’t do in life hit me right in the face.

In reality, you can’t let the advice of others who have never done it for themselves, determine where you are going in life. Let’s face it nine out of 10 times the people around you have never experienced any level of super success whether in life or business. They simply have done what everyone in every generation before them has done: Accept mediocrity. Most of your parents weren’t world champion Olympians, athlete or high performance people.

No approval nor acceptance.

You don’t need your parents, your friends or your peer’s approval to start a business. You don’t need their feedback or even their honest opinions. Truthfully all of it is absolute rubbish! You wouldn’t take advice on climbing Mount Everest from a cousin who works at a tire shop would you? If you did, you’d be dead before you even got half way up the mountain.

Lead your dream team by example.

Build your dream team. Hire the right people and don’t be afraid to investigate them. In the same regard, you must trust and believe people will do the right thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of Fortune 500 company or a small time blogger who’s only looking to hire a small team of writers. The truth is you must be willing to delegate and allow those around you to grow with you. It takes a strong leader to keep things on track and push forward the right direction.

Even when you make plans God will laugh and they will fail. You’ll have to adapt along with your team. Your employees will follow your lead and you will set the example. If you are not motivated, you can be assured neither will the rest of your team.

Goals or it’s gone.

It takes sacrifice. A tremendous amount of sacrifice. It means dropping anything and everything that isn’t a part of your goals, completely out of your life. It’s far easier said than done. That means no more Facebook. No more twitter, sports bars, football games, Netflix and so on. All those old friends that you hang out with, even the ones that don’t drag you down, will eventually be removed from your life and replaced by mentors. It doesn’t matter what your past relationship is with them; if they are not a part of your goals that have no part in your life. Most people can’t accept that. They are afraid of being alone. Truthfully, being a high-performance person does, in fact, make you a lone wolf. You’ve got to be okay steering the ship alone.

Being your own boss is all about working late nights and early mornings. Most of which you spend in the office all by yourself. You will stop remembering what day it is and start thinking in terms of what needs to get done. You won’t have any time left to spend on things that truly don’t matter.

This why having mentors by your side is so critical. Without them, you have absolutely no one to turn to other than yourself. There will be times when you need advice, and honestly the only place you find it is either through your mentor or failing firsthand. You must surround yourself with high-performance people. If you hang out with friends at the sports bar and drink beer every night, rest assured you’ll be in that bar stool for the rest of your life.

Patience and focus.

You must be patient. Stop seeking instant gratification all the time. You don’t build a million-dollar business overnight. You don’t become a high-performance businessman overnight. You don’t become the best nor top salesman overnight either. It takes time. It requires plenty of commitment. Don’t think for one second that means sitting on your lazy, miserable bum will magically turn your dreams to realities.

You will experience failure at some point and it happen over and over again. It will challenge you all the way down to the core. But let’s face it, being your own boss means learning from your own mistakes. It means understanding them and moving forward at every turn in the road. Unfortunately, most men can’t do that. Failure haunts them it and seduces them to throw in the towel early at every single step of the way.

Pay yourself.

Pay yourself and your people first. Don’t sink it all back into the business. You don’t want to be 80 years old ready to sell and come to the realization that the market isn’t willing to buy. Just like that all of your dreams of cashing out the end vanish. If you had hoped to sell for millions, you might just find yourself with a buyer who is only willing to pay hundreds of thousands.

Negotiation is the grease to a wheel that keeps it moving.

You’ve got to know how to negotiate. You’ve got to know how to deal with people. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of customer service with a disgruntled customer or with an employee on your dream team who demands a higher salary. Perhaps it’s with the bank over a financial deal or with a dream client who is just not quite ready to make a sale. In any event, negotiation is at the heart of it all.

You are all you need.

If you want to be your own boss you don’t need a college degree, you don’t need a Harvard MBA, nor do you don’t need to read thousands and thousands of books. You don’t need to listen to hours and hours of podcasts. All of it truthfully it doesn’t mean jack shit. The only thing that you need is a willingness to take action. That’s it. Every question you have right now will eventually be answered along the way. If you aren’t prepared to deal with failure and learn from your mistakes, being your own boss isn’t for you!

Beyond popular belief, education is not a step towards success. And there’s a good reason for that. These things doesn’t equate to taking action. You could spend an entire lifetime reading libraries of business books but if you never get started in actually running a business, you will have accomplished absolutely nothing.

You will be the captain of your own ship. You will be held responsible for everything that happens to you in life and business. You will have to hold other accountable. There are no excuses. There is no blame to place on anyone other than yourself.

The number one excuse most people make when starting a business is proclaiming they cannot find any funding or financing. The statement is complete and absolute bullshit. Most men don’t even pick up the phone to make a single call to one bank. Some give up after the second. Very, very few are willing to call 100 and 100 more in order to get what they want. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter how brilliant or stupid your idea is. There is a doofus out there somewhere who is willing to invest in it.

But it doesn’t just extend financing, most people who fail in business have excuses that are all over the place. If they had just stuck with it and put in a complete and total effort, their story would’ve been completely different. Laziness is truly the opium for the poor man. Most men are absolutely addicted to it. Their original motivation crumbles away when they are put to the real test in the real world.

While it’s best to save up at least six months of living expenses, it’s certainly not a requirement to get started today. If you’re starting out absolutely broke, it’s actually a great thing. Let’s face it there only two options: success or starving. Truthfully that divide in the road makes beasts and demons out of men.

In reality, all you really need is a notebook a pen and a cell phone. Most of you already have those three things. To say you don’t have this or that to get started with your business is only one gigantic excuse.

It’s a damn business.

It’s not a side hustle. It’s not a hobby. It’s a damn business. And you must without question, have laser beam focus. You must demand that you are number one in your industry. You must insist of yourself that you break every single record by any man before you. You are either the greatest, or you are nothing at all.

Goals beyond your wildest imaginations.

Most men hope to make an extra 200 bucks a month, and that is being successful in their minds. They limit their goals to what they think is in close reach. But there’s a huge difference between striving for 200 bucks extra month and 200 million at the end of the year. In reality, you must be willing to set your goals higher than the new could ever imagine in not one but two or three lifetimes and beyond.

Truthfully, most men who want to be their own boss fail because they don’t have goals or simply fail to set them high enough. If you aim for two hundred bucks a month, I can assure you will be satisfied at hundred and honestly, that’s probably all you’ll reach. If you if you would only set your goals to 200 million, there’s a good chance you could come in at 50 or even 100 million when it’s all said and done. In the beginning, you may view that is unrealistic and entirely impossible, but when you believe those goals are a reality, you can be damn sure you will do everything to get as close to them as possible. And most of the time, you do.

Take control.

You must be willing to take control. Everything in your past has no bearing on your future. It doesn’t matter where you were born, what your family was like, or even how your parents raised you. It doesn’t matter if your dirt poor or were abused all your life. Your past is just that, your past. In the business world, you will be challenged constantly. The super successful men of this world know how to deal with those sorts of problems and move forward. Remember tough times don’t last tough men do.

In other words, get your emotional and financial bank account life in order.

Take action.

You must be willing to turn your ideas into actionable steps toward your goals. If there is one hurdle in business that trips virtually everyone, it’s taking action. Most refuse to do it, and not just once but on a daily basis. You have to understand running a business means taking action not just a few times but millions and millions of times. It’s constant, hard work. All the bullshit you read about a work week that’s only a few hours is just that, bullshit. A business is like a leech; it sucks up all your time. You can’t just ignore it. When you do competitors will come out of the woods like wolves and eat you alive.

Now, it easy to be lazy. I mean extremely easy. Hell, you can even be a fat cat with past successes and still succumb to laziness. You can’t just rest on your past.

Be never in doubt.

Never share your self-doubts. The moment you do, you turn them into a reality. When you think of losing, you become a loser. There’s a good reason why winners consistently win because winning is all think about. They will accept nothing less. There will be times when you will be wrong, but you must never be in doubt! Trust your gut!

A passionate pursuit.

Now there are a lot of ways to be your own boss. You can either start or purchase an established business. The concept is simple. However, the fastest way to super success is through a series of transactions. That means buying smaller businesses, rounding them up into one company, and taking what you have created to market after you puffed it up like a fat hog.

For some of you, that route isn’t one you’ll want to take. When you start your own business, you have to understand it requires a lot of time when you’re starting from scratch. However, that’s not to say, that starting a brand-new company is a wrong way to approach being your own boss.

Regardless of what you choose there is one thing you must have. And that is passion. It’s like when you meet a new woman, and you can’t get enough of her. You want to see her all the time and let’s face it, you’re hooked on her love. When you find that type of feeling in business, you must go all in.

Now, I know a lot of guys who’ve started in some of the weirdest niches and industries on the planet. Most of these gentleman are not passionate from the start, and only see the dollar signs. After about 12 months in they get bored, they lose complete and total motivation. They no longer have the drive to push forward, and the result is they quit. You see this happen all the time, especially on Internet. When it comes to websites, most people don’t just make one. They make a handful. And when one doesn’t work as well is they wanted it to, they scrap everything and try something different. It’s not a strategy, it’s succumbing to lack passion and ultimately an excuse.

Investigate more.

Investigate more so that you can spend less. That doesn’t just mean the market, but it also means the people that you hire and do business with. While it’s important to do your homework, you need to be doing the right kind of homework. That doesn’t mean reading business books about how the market works. That means going out into the market and seeing how it works for yourself firsthand. No book in the world can tell you if your product will be successful. Ultimately the market will determine that, and the market changes every day. An idea that was hot last year could be a total disaster if rolled out this year.

The last thing you want is to find yourself jumping into an industry that has absolutely no market. And the easiest way to do that is to fail to do your research in the first place! It doesn’t matter how amazing you think the ideas you have are or how grand your business plans may be; the answer will ultimately only be discovered when you take action!

Speaking of business plans, you truly don’t need them. A lot of people think that you need a business plan in order to get financing, and let me tell you, that’s just not the case. When you do need one, you can ask your banker to show you one that was recently approved. Of course, they will want to black out the names and personal information.

One of the biggest misconceptions out there is that you need all these papers in order to prove your plan. In reality, all that’s required is enthusiasm. And let’s face it that comes from you. It doesn’t matter how good your business plan is, if you lack enthusiasm no one’s going to believe in it. You have to show people that you believe in what you’re doing. When you do, others will follow.

Now, I have seen the types of pitch decks that successful startups have used in order to get financing. Can you take a guess what’s in them? The answer is all the results of investigation! However, remember a pitch deck, like a business plan is nothing more than a wild ass guess!

Is it for you?

Being your own boss is not for everyone. It’s just not. Most men are too lazy undetermined lack focus. It doesn’t matter what their background is, where they came from, or how great their idea could be. Let’s face it, living life by your own rules scares the hell out of most people. It’s fear. What is fear? False expectations appearing real. It’s what stops most benefit from taking action.

The moment they hit a speed bump in the road they panic. They aren’t willing to put in the time nor the sacrifices in order to reach their goals. Let’s face it, being your own boss requires those two things in abundance. You give and you get.

Most are not ready for the challenge. They put it off all the way until their death bed. And they sit back and wonder what if. The what if question, has been plaguing them their entire life. What if they had just taken action? What they just sacrificed a little more? What if they had not given into instant gratification so easily? Truthfully, there are a million what-ifs.

When you start a business, you don’t need to answer all of them. You just need to do it! In fact, you can enter an industry that you have absolutely no previous experience in. You can investigate it and leap forward if you see an opportunity. The problem is that most men are not willing to leap into darkness.

There’s a lot of unknowns out there and being your own boss presents you with all of them at once. Don’t be afraid take risks, because being your own boss means taking many of them.

You will scare yourself shitless on a daily basis. In reality, the bigger the risk we take, the larger the rewards we receive.