Tossone is clear about one thing: he doesn’t expect everyone who reads his book to become a millionaire. Rather, he says, “My goal is that when you finish reading, you will feel better about yourself, be glad that you read it, and better your lot in life because of it.”

Be goal-oriented, but flexible

Tossone talks about an insurance client whose barber and beauty supply store failed, and how the owner started going to barber shops, hoping to dump his surplus stock and get at least a little of his investment back — except he discovered that no one else in the Chicago area offered commercial barber supply deliveries, and barbers were uniformly tired of having to go pick up supplies on their days off. Whoa! From failure to accidental success! The friend soon had two trucks and several employees.

He shares other anecdotes about how, sure, you need to set goals (and offers some of the most sensible goal-setting advice I’ve ever read), but how along the way you need to be alert for other opportunties and not be so fixated on your original goal(s) that you can’t see other paths when they open up in fron of you.

Specific sales and business advice

Go For It! contains a fair amount of advice about how to prospect, how to set appointments, how to arrange the way you and clients sit, how to overcome objections, and how to close. None of this will be new to the average insurance salesperson, but if you’ve spent most or all of your working life in a server room, you may not have heard much of this before — and selling is selling, whether it’s insurance or subcontracted SMB IT service.

But that’s not all! (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)

Tossone has some very wise advice on the pleasures and pitfalls of working from home instead of from an office, and why you need to watch your expenses as much as you need to scrabble for income.

Public speaking

One proven way to become an expert in your field to whom local business types turn for problem solutions is by speaking to business groups — or by putting together your own seminars. (“How You Can Save Money by Using Linux in Your Business” is a potential seminar title that comes to mind.)

I’ve spoken to groups of business people, conference attendees, and students all over the world, and Tossone talks about how to set up room layouts, dinners where the speaker goes on afterwards, and other details I’ve never thought of, that would have made me a better speaker if I had.

—–

This is a 161 page book that costs $16.95 from the publisher, $13.22 or less from Amazon, and $9.99 as an ebook from Barnes & Noble.

We’re talking about a tiny investment in money and reading time compared to the amount of startup fumbling this book can save you, let alone the amount of money and satisfaction it may help you get if you follow Tossone’s advice.

Unless you like work better than anything else — i.e., your job is more fun than sex — a decrease in working hours is likely to lead to an increase in life satisfaction, which is not the same as job satisfaction.

Do you really enjoy work more than sex or gaming? If not, are there any jobs you could conceivably get that *would* be more fun than anything else you do? And if you currently enjoy work more than anything else, but you currently have no spouse or partner, is it possible that if you *had* a spouse or partner, you might want to spend less time working because your priorities would change?

Life changes, and your job needs change, too

Your needs are different when you’re 24 and single than ahen you’re 34, married, and have children.

Eventually, kids grow up and leave home. Once again, your needs change. If you always wanted to buy a 36′ ketch and live on board in the Caribbean, this is the time of life when you can do it, especially if you have kept your nose to the grindstone and saved your money for several decades.

In the work context, you may have risen into a supervisory position, and you happily accepted it because you the additional pay helped feed your constantly-hungry children. But now I’m going to give you a bit of heresy:

Is it possible that you might be better off rejecting promotion, and looking for more job satisfaction instead?

Assume you’re married. Can you cut your standard of living — not to starvation, but to where only one of you has to work? You almost certainly can, if you and you spouse center your job searches around that goal instead of trying to maximize income.

If you’re single and enjoy coding more than supervising other coders, you can almost certainly manage to live on a coder’s income. If you don’t get a new roadster this year to impress girls, the girls you meet will be more worthwhile than ones who only want you ’cause you have a cool car. And you will meet more worthwhile girls (or guys, depending on your taste) in coffeehouses and libraries than in $5-a-shot, too-loud nightclubs.

Many years ago, the Army realized that many soldiers in the E-4 rank deserved promotion, but neither wanted to be troop-leadinf sergeants or would be good leaders. So the Army created an E-5 (but not sergeant) rank for people in tech-type military occupations so they they could get the promotion and additional pay they deserved, while still doing useful work they enjoyed.

There are civilian equivalents to this concept, although they aren’t necessarily spelled out in written regulations the way they are in the military. The trick is to find them, whether in an employment interview while answering one of those “where do you see yourself in five years?” questions or during an annual performance review by your current supervisor.

And yes, there’s always the self-employment option, although it may not be right for you if you’re an introverted, code-all-night person. But that is another column I’ll write in the next week or two, with specific advice on how to become a good salesperson, since a large part of tiny-business success is sales, no matter what kind of business you’re in.

But when it comes to employment, no matter what Franklin said, the choice between freedom and security is not always easy to make.

Consider the work-at-home freelancer’s life: if he or she wants to go sailing in the middle of a workday, who will say no? What about a beer at lunch? Or at breakfast? Or a couple of cocktails for breakfast and a few more at lunch?

Some people have enough self-discipline and self-motivation to refrain from excess boozing when they’re supposed to be working, and to stay on land during working hours — unless they’re caught up on work or willing to put in weekend time to make up for weekday time spent sailing (or going to the park or hanging out with a girl/boyfriend or some other non-work activity).

Franklin said, in a piece titled Advice to a Young Tradesman, “Remember that time is money.”

And so it always has been, not only to tradesmen in Franklin’s day, but also to IT freelancers in the 21st Century. If you cannot manage your working time wisely, you should not be self-employed except for periods “between jobs,” as the old British saying described breaks in employment.

Self-employment means not only maintaining enough self-discipline to complete tasks for your clients on time and on (or under) budget, but also finding clients and getting work to do. And buying health insurance, at least in the USA, where this is one of the most awful parts of being self-employed, especially if you are over 40. Then there’s holidays. Most people who have jobs got July 4 off, with pay. Those of us who work for ourselves did not.

None of this means that working for someone else is always paradise. If it was, there would not be a movie coming out this week called Horrible Bosses.

However, there are plenty of wonderful reasons to get a full-time job, assuming you can find one that matches your skill-set and is with a company you like, doing work you enjoy.

For one thing, you’ll probably get a paycheck every week or two or twice a month without invoicing and hoping you’ll get your money in 30 days, or at least in 60 days, which is a common situation for freelancers. There’s also the joy of company-bought health insurance. Even if you have to pay part of its cost, chances are that you’ll get way better coverage, for way less money, as an employee than as a self-employed consultant or freelancer.

Which should I do: work for myself or for someone else?

The reality is, I cannot answer this question for you. I know people who need the structure of a job and an organized workplace to function, including a neighbor who once said, “I can’t freelance from home because I’d sit on the couch watching sports all day.” This is someone who has a pretty good job now, in an office with a boss watching him work, and is happy about it.

I know other people who have gotten so comfortable working for themselves that it’s doubtful that they’ll ever be able to work full-time for anyone else, ever again — except that “never say never” (NOT a Franklin quote) applies here. Even if you’re a happy, successful freelancer, if your work dries up you may need to work for BoringSoft Development to keep up with your mortgage. Or even (shudder) stock shelves at Wal~Mart or Home Depot if that’s all the work you can find and you seriously need money to buy food.

Times are tough right now. About five times as many Americans are looking for work as there are open jobs. These are bad odds, unless you are in the top 20% of job-seekers — or are, as you probably are if you’re reading this — in some part of the IT industry, where there are more openings and fewer job-seekers than in most fields of employmen.

But no matter what the hiring situation is at the moment, self-employment is worth a look as an alternative to working for someone else. Just make sure you have the self-discipline and self-motivation — and enough financial reserves — to handle it.