Within each of us is a desire to be our own boss. We've all had our "million dollar" idea or one too many horrible bosses that make us want to start our own company. Yet the truth is simple: Owning your own business takes hard work, determination, sacrifice, and a very clear understanding of not just your business, but also your personality. Here are a few points to consider when deciding to become an entrepreneur:

[See our list of the 50 Best Careers.]

1. Don't quit your day job...yet. Whether you're currently a student, working part-time, or gainfully employed, the next great idea usually doesn't need 40 or more hours per week to get off the ground. Create a strict schedule for how much time you really need. You may not make any money for a while, so keep whatever job is currently paying you. And don't ask your spouse or significant other to quit their job (like I did), or you could end up living in your parents' mobile home (like we did).

2. Estimate your annual revenue, and then divide it half. Some businesses never get off the ground, while others grow at such an amazing pace that annual estimates become obsolete immediately. However, you must be realistic about the time it will take for your efforts to really kick in. Calculate how much you think you can make, then divide it in half and plan your expenses around that number instead.

3. Make "free" your favorite word. New businesses must keep expenses as low as possible, and it doesn't get any lower than free. Brainstorm creative ways to grow and operate your business at little to no cost. Trade services with other businesses in any industry; for example, if you know graphic design but don't have a clue about databases, consider swapping your design skills in order to have your database set up. Before spending money on marketing, take advantage of free methods--like, for instance, Craigslist--to spread the word about your new business.

[See 5 Free Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About.]

4. Know your business well, but know yourself better. You and your business will be practically one entity for a while, so realize your morals and values when making decisions and building relationships. Don't bash competitors or make business deals that you don't feel right about. Be the boss that others would desire to have. You must know who you are and how you'll react to challenges and situations; stick with your core values and ensure your business is in line with them as well. Most importantly, make sure you love what you're doing, since you'll probably be working twice as hard for half as much money in the beginning.

5. Take a break, take a walk, and take a shower. Entrepreneurship is exciting, but don't let it consume you. To keep moving in the right direction with fresh ideas, you need to take breaks often. It may be as easy as taking a walk or perhaps you might even take a shower. Sometimes you can think better when not thinking about business. Make time for breaks away from your new project so that you can come back with a fresh perspective.

If you're finally ready to start your own business, then create a schedule, reduce your expectations, find things for free, and figure out who you really are--then, go take a shower.

Steven Staley is the owner and founder of SoCo Sports, a sport and social club located in Sarasota, Fla. He is also the creator, founder, and owner of Playbook Community, a free mobile application that connects athletes and sports organizers across the globe. Steven is also a member of The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.

First, understand that you no longer want to be just a millionaire. You want to become a multimillionaire.

While you may think a million dollars will give you financial security, it will not. Given the volatility in economies, governments and financial markets around the world, it's no longer safe to assume a million dollars will provide you and your family with true security. In fact, a Fidelity Investments' study of millionaires last year found that 42 percent of them don't feel wealthy and they would need $7.5 million of investable assets to start feeling rich.

This isn't a how-to on the accumulation of wealth from a lifetime of saving and pinching pennies. This is about generating multimillion-dollar wealth and enjoying it during the creation process. To get started, consider these seven secrets of multimillionaires.

No. 1: Decide to Be a Multimillionaire -- You first have to decide you want to be a self-made millionaire. I went from nothing—no money, just ideas and a lot of hard work—to create a net worth that probably cannot be destroyed in my lifetime. The first step was making a decision and setting a target. Every day for years, I wrote down this statement: "I am worth over $100,000,000!"

Related: Seven Rules for Coping with Sales Rejection

No. 2: Get Rid of Poverty Thinking - There's no shortage of money on planet Earth, only a shortage of people who think correctly about it. To become a millionaire from scratch, you must end the poverty thinking. I know because I had to. I was raised by a single mother who did everything possible to put three boys through school and make ends meets. Many of the lessons she taught me encouraged a sense of scarcity and fear: "Eat all your food; there are people starving," "Don't waste anything," "Money doesn't grow on trees." Real wealth and abundance aren't created from such thinking. 

No. 3: Treat it Like a Duty - Self-made multimillionaires are motivated not just by money, but by a need for the marketplace to validate their contributions. While I have always wanted wealth, I was driven more by my need to contribute consistent with my potential. Multimillionaires don't lower their targets when things get tough. Rather, they raise expectations for themselves because they see the difference they can make with their families, company, community and charities. 

Related Video: Grant Cardone on Closing the Sale

No. 4: Surround Yourself with Multimillionaires - I have been studying wealthy people since I was 10 years old. I read their stories and see what they went through. These are my mentors and teachers who inspire me. You can't learn how to make money from someone who doesn't have much. Who says, "Money won't make you happy"? People without money. Who says, "All rich people are greedy"? People who aren't rich. Wealthy people don't talk like that. You need to know what people are doing to create wealth and follow their example: What do they read? How do they invest? What drives them? How do they stay motivated and excited? 

No. 5: Work Like a Millionaire - Rich people treat time differently. They buy it, while poor people sell it. The wealthy know time is more valuable than money itself, so they hire people for things they're not good at or aren't a productive use of their time, such as household chores. But don't kid yourself that those who hit it big don't work hard. Financially successful people are consumed by their hunt for success and work to the point that they feel they are winning and not just working. 

Related: How to Conquer Your Sales Fears

No. 6: Shift Focus from Spending to Investing - The rich don't spend money; they invest. They know the U.S. tax laws favor investing over spending. You buy a house and can't write it off. The rich, in contrast, buy an apartment building that produces cash flow, appreciates and offers write-offs year after year. You buy cars for comfort and style. The rich buy cars for their company that are deductible because they are used to produce revenue.

No. 7: Create Multiple Flows of Income - The really rich never depend on one flow of income but instead create a number of revenue streams. My first business had been generating a seven-figure income for years when I started investing cash in multifamily real estate. Once my real estate and my consulting business were churning, I went into a third business developing software to help retailers improve the customer experience.
Lastly, you may be surprised to learn that wealthy people wish you were wealthy, too. It's a mystery to them why others don't get rich. They know they aren't special and that wealth is available to anyone who wants to focus and persist. Rich people want others to be rich for two reasons: first, so you can buy their products and services, and second, because they want to hang out with other rich people. Get rich -- it's American.

Facebook's $5-billion initial public offering has sent shock waves rippling through the markets. But what does it really mean? Amid all the hype and conjecture, here's a quick rundown of the potential impact:

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1 — Short-term, business as usual

To the average user, nothing changes for now. Going public doesn't change how a web-based service works and the typical user probably wouldn't know anything had changed behind the scenes. Google's going public, for example, didn't result in any overnight changes to the way its search engine worked. While it may have created a lot of employee-millionaires — and in Facebook's case, the number of instant-millionaires could top 1,000 — the service itself was little-changed initially.

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2 — Longer-term, it's a slightly different story

An IPO gives a company access to resources — Facebook could reap $5 billion in cash — that could allow it to buy whatever it wants. For a company like Facebook, it means a gold rush for hiring engineers, developers and other critical staff. Or buying other companies that can further fuel its growth.

The benefits extend beyond the company itself. Governments everywhere — including those in high-tech Canadian hotspots like Waterloo region — compete with each other to attract satellite operations that, in turn, attract high-tech, high-value jobs. In the wake of Nortel's collapse and RIM's rocky road, extravaganzas like Facebook could give investment-seeking municipalities hope that they could potentially land an R&D or marketing operation

3 — The markets need this

The ongoing recession ground all major sector investment activity to a halt when it first blanketed the markets in 2008, and huge IPOs have been off the radar since since then. A few last year — LinkedIn and Pandora, for example — got the ball rolling again, but they've failed to take off since, with share prices falling below the initial offer level.

The Facebook IPO could either reignite a wave of investment in tech — which could send stronger signals to other sectors and pull investors spooked by the market chaos back into the fray — or it could be a case of too-high expectations ultimately flattened by the cold reality of European debt, Iranian sabre-rattling and fears of a stalled U.S. recovery. We won't know until the markets have had a chance to weigh in after go-live, but for the first time in years, there's at least a light at the end of the IPO tunnel.

Average users still probably don't care. But recession-scarred investors probably do, as it's a massively bright spot in the middle of a whole lot of uncertainty.

4 — It marks a fundamental shift

Why are the numbers so big and why is this causing such a fuss? Simple: Social media is becoming the new "in" place for people to spend their time online. Once upon a time, Google dominated our online activity because it helped us navigate a then-new landscape. But as we spend less time searching and more time poking, statusing and sharing photos, advertisers are shifting to where the action is.

This tectonic shift is the Internet equivalent of a gold rush, and largely explains why Google is scrambling so aggressively to catch up with its push to bake its Facebook-competitor Google+ into its entire range of services.

4 - Personal data is the currency of the future

Facebook has busted into an elite club of companies - including Google, Amazon and Apple - that collectively know everything we do online. They know who our friends are, what our interests are, our individual backgrounds, employment histories, tastes in entertainment, travel preferences, etc. That data allows advertisers to narrowly focus in on us in ways that are only now becoming understood.

The more things we do in online landscapes like Facebook, the more they learn about us. And the more they are worth to advertisers. For now, a $100 billion valuation divided by Facebook's 800 million users puts a $125 price on each of us. Going forward, those numbers will only grow.

6 - An IPO is only the beginning

Publicly traded companies are fuelled by growth. Facebook will have to figure out ways to continue to grow its user base at an historically rapid clip — which means major global expansion, as growth rates in North America and Europe are already starting to flatten because most folks who would use it are already signed up.

The company will also have to get the users that it has to spend more time in its universe. So those interface redesigns — Timeline, anyone? — that so annoy so many will become a more frequent thing. So will new apps, new partnerships, new developers and new capabilities. When you're public, standing still is equivalent to being dead in the water, so like it or not we can expect a post-IPO Facebook to become a master of rapid reinvention.

7 - Facebook will need to grow up

A publicly traded company is subject to much more rigid operational and reporting rules than a privately owned one. Facebook has long been known as something of a bad boy when it comes to corporate governance. Its approach to privacy, for example, has put it squarely in the sights of Canada's own privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart.

After global investors take ownership of their respective chunks, Facebook will need to be less of a rogue player. This could lead to better leadership on the thorny issue of privacy/confidentiality, and give everyday users more protection from third party developers who play fast and loose with the rules.

8 - It signifies that social media is truly coming of age

Facebook started as a way to find the best-looking students on campus and evolved into an often-dismissed website where folks poked each other and posted what they'd just had for lunch. An IPO of this scale sends the message, loud and clear, that Facebook has evolved well beyond its simple, seemingly trivial roots. And as poster boy for a whole new generation of social media tools - hello Twitter - it confirms that social media is the Internet, and Facebook is just as serious a player as Google, Amazon and Apple.

Carmi Levy is a London, Ont.-based independent technology analyst and journalist. The opinions expressed are his own. carmilevy@yahoo.ca

Tip #1:
Don't care what other people think. I know you may think "How am I supposed to do that?". Well the fact is that you can't change what anybody else thinks. Imagine you are at a public gathering and you have really low self confidence at that point in time. You come home and you feel really bad because you thought you where judged by other people. Your best friend James, thought the same thing when he came home. Judith thought exactly the same thing. The point is, people care more about themselves than they care about you. So inevitably don't care what other people think of you. You are not put on this planet to please all. It's OK to fail, it's OK to be different, it's OK to do what you feel is right for you!

Tip #2:

Allow being judged. This is something that can be really hard, but guess what. In order to boost self confidence to great heights, you must be able to do things your way and be ok with other people disliking what you do. Again, almost everybody in the world judges people, I judge people for sure. If somebody tells me that I am something negative that I know I am. Let's say ugly, or fat... I can simply laugh it off and say, "So what, I can't change my genes and this is the way I am, do you have something else you want to judge me by, please get it off your chest?". See there is nothing a person can say to you that you can't counter in one way or another.

Tip #3:

Have really strong beliefs. The two tips above come down to one thing and that is having a strong self belief and solid ground in your confidence. There are many exercises you can take in order to really learn how to gain self confidence. You must get your beliefs in order first, otherwise you will always have a doubt in your mind somewhere. People are experts at destroying their own beliefs by having negative thoughts. STOP negative thoughts now.

Tip #4:

Writing your goals down on paper. People who fail will write their goals down once, look at them, put pen and paper down and then forget about it. People who have learnt how to gain self confidence proceed with their goals and never ever quit. I know this may sound harsh right now, but quitters remain quitters until they believe they can be winners. Be a winner.

Tip #5:

Be a winner. Even if you lose at one point in time be a winner. Even if somebody totally humiliates you, you are a winner. Why? Simply because everybody is a winner. Everybody is good at something. The reason you have low self confidence is because you have been programmed to believe something that isn't true... at all. Maybe people around you have told you that you are worthless or too stupid to do something. Guess what, you are not, you are a winner. You are a winner because you know that if you set your mind to do something you will obtain this goal. You have done it before, every single time. You just don't know it.

Tip #6:

Have extreme determination and faith. Know that if you have set your mind to do something you will obtain it. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day. Maybe not in 1 week or even 1 year. Learning how to gain self confidence takes time. Some people get over these negative thoughts and gain amazing self confidence in only 10 days. For some people the programming has taken much harder and it takes them 2 months. Maybe you are so deep into it that it takes 5 years? Even if it takes 5 years, when that day comes and you know when you are there, you will feel that 5 years was worth it.

Tip #7:

Patience. Learning how to gain self confidence is like fishing with a fishing rod, in a way. Let me explain. have you ever tried to fish with a fishing rod and you see something happen. You reel in to see if something happened. You find the fish has broke lose. You get pissed and throw it back in the water. This happens 5-10 times before you catch anything. In the mean time your friend is pulling up the fish every single time and he is laughing of joy. He is patient... he knows that when the fish bites, it takes a little bit of time before the hook is 100% attached. The point here is that, if something doesn't work for you, throw the rod back in and try again. When you want to give up the most, you know you are the closest!

So, you have been trying to guess for some time now, your gut feeling says that yes, she is definitely into you but your mind suggests that you shouldn’t proceed unless you are a bit more sure. When faced with the predicament of finding out whether she is actually interested in you or not, check-out the following signs:

1. She Makes Suggestive Eye Contact

Eye contact or ‘eye play’ as it is referred to by many people, is perhaps the most suggestive and confirmative of all signs. If her eye contact with you is devoid of too many blinks, if she doesn’t hesitate to stare back at you and if you find her trying to make eye contact with you even from a distance, you have definitely managed to impress her in some way.

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 2. She Keeps Suggesting Catching A Cup Of Coffee Together

Asking out a lady for a cup of coffee remains the most formal and accepted forms of initiating the process of getting familiar with the fairer sex, helping to establish if the liking is mutual. Once a male bastion, girls are open to asking out men for coffee these days and if she has asked you out repeatedly, she is indirectly hinting that she enjoys your company and wants you to take the next step.

3. She Keeps Getting Closer When Being Distant Is An Option

Have you have noticed that even during formal conversation and in circumstances when physical proximity wasn’t needed, she seemed unusually close to you? She might change her seat during a meeting or lunch to be seated next to you or might repeatedly shake hands with you for casual congratulations or lean over your desk when having a conversation, when standing upright seemed feasible. These are sure signs of her growing interest in you.

4. She Seems To Have A Regular Schedule For You

Trying to think of the last few days—if it seems that she has created a pattern that includes wishing your good morning and the evening goodbye with a big smile, messaging you goodnight, emailing you happy quotes or jokes and being curious about what you had for lunch, it suggests that she has put some thought into ensuring that you are reminded about her presence throughout the day.

5. Her Availability Is Never An Issue

Either at her desk, at the gym or even during a late-night call, it seems that she always has time for you. Even if her phone is busy, she makes it a point to call you back immediately. Even if she seems overloaded with work, she makes a point to exchange pleasantries with you or ask about your day.

6. She Molds Conversations Towards Opportunities Of Companionship

If conversations with her have been lately carrying subtle hints about going out together, exploring new eating joints or doing a combo purchase on that new online deal, it is highly suggestive that she is seeking your company or is at least, indicating that she enjoys your presence—whether in a platonic manner or romantic, you need to scrape further.

7. She Is Ready To Counsel You

If it seems that she is always there trying to help you or counsel you over the smallest issue you might have told her about, chances of her being interfering or over-friendly also arise but it is also possible that she is trying to show her interest in your life. If she seems genuinely interested and constantly takes updates about your problems, it is most likely she cares for you in some capacity.

8. Some Openly Flirtatious Gestures

Occasionally, licking or biting her lips in a slightly seductive manner when you guys are talking and teasing you about your purely bachelor status are gestures that you have ignited some degree of liking for you within her. If her seemingly innocent smiles have been getting more frequent and she has been forwarding you naughty SMSs regularly, it is time you asked her out. If some of the most dependable female traits are decoded in terms of their flirtatious intent, then the tendency of a lady to repeatedly flick her hair or run her fingers through her mane is perhaps the most established signs of her seductive tendencies taking over.

9. She Has Been Probing You

If you find out that she has been trying to keep a tab on you, finding more about your personal and professional life from acquaintances or getting too curious on Facebook, it is a definite sign that is genuinely interested in you.

10. She Despises Other Women Near You

Call it jealously or possessiveness, but most women are vulnerable to openly displaying their disgust for their men being poached upon by other women, even those whom you have declared as your friend or an office sister. If you see her frowning or getting upset whenever you get too pally with your female office mates, you can assume that she thinks of you two together in some way.