When you are self employeed, you alone motivate yourself. There is nothing stopping me from getting out of my chair and doing any damn thing I please. I could watch a movie, go to a party, or hop on a plane to Miami. Whats going to keep you working when other people are practically dragging you away to do these things?

First, ask yourself — what part of the business frustrates me the most? Frustration is the fast track to burn out. You need to isolate specific tasks that make you irritated, angry, or unhappy. Is it creating CSS designs? Programming Java? Updating your software? Writing?

If eveything about the business frustrates you, stop. You are in the wrong field, you need to find something else to do.

Your best solution for combating frustration is delegating the task. Hire an employee. If you can’t hire an employee, bring on a business partner that loves doing the part you hate.

Repeated Failure to produce measurable results is the next cause of burnout. Two years ago I worked on a site for a full month. I researched, I wrote, I tried building links. Ultimately, the site ended up making a couple of dollars a day.

Had I repeated that process again 12 times that year, I would likely not be in this business today. Instead, I learned from my mistakes, cut down my site development time to a week, and made sites that did not have the stopping points of the first project. Instead of chasing the high cost-per-click words, I built sites for niches with minimal keyphrase competition that I knew I could get backlinks to.

As a self-employed business owner you control your direction. Employee burn out is different. As a subordinate you have to figure out how to cope with a confined set of circumstances or quit. If your or an employee or student I can not help you, but you might want to check out this list.

In order to flourish, you need to create an enabling environment around you. This is just as important as evolving around factors which you can not control.

Perhaps this is anecdotal, but the most successful people find work to be an object of desire rather than a means of survival. It attracts them because they do the things they specifically enjoy, and let others handle the rest.

Do not let burn out kill your dreams. Fight it, just as you would any other obstacle.

I was waiting to plug this until their free widget was out, but its two days after the given release date and its still not there. I found an interesting little beta tool from the guys over at DomainTools.com/Whois.sc: Psychic Whois.

When you enter in a domain name, or part of a domain name, a live AJAX drop-down view shows you available or registered names in close proximity. Its confusing, but an interesting way to discover domain names quickly.

Try putting in your favorite blog names (just the beginning, leave out the dot com) you might discover some interesting combinations.

When I first decided to start my own business a few years ago I was pretty much broke. I was a moderately good painter and writer, but I had never done anything very remarkable.

I am happy to say things have changed in some very big ways. The spark first started when I helped a stranger out. A quick thank you note the next saying my suggestion had already made him $100. Thats when I realised where my future would be.

Here are a few of the critical lessons I’ve learned, and I think you should too:

1. Take your business seriously. Scrap the dreams of making six figures working an hour a day 5 days a week. That day can come, but until then, set your goals and work, sleep, work until they happen. Everything else takes a back seat. A perfect quote from Quadzilla — “You’re in the right industry. You’re in it at the right time. You’re in it while search is still in its infancy.” Don’t pass up on the biggest opportunity of generations because your school guidance counselor says this isn’t real.

2. Read between the lines, but don’t read into them. In other words, try to figure out what is really there, but don’t fantasize things that aren’t really there. In your mind you want an accurate and functioning image of how all the other companies in your industry (and outside of it) function and make their profits.

3. Test, test, and test some more. My first 3 businesses were flops. The next few were pretty mediocre. I’ve tested different industries, business partners, monetization methods and so on. The more you test the more you understand what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes you discover those things that didn’t work, actually work really well, you just had a few things wrong with the technical implementation. If you insist on believing its luck, then its the testing which tips the odds in your favor.

4. Scale up and scale out. The difference between the guy making $70,000 a year and the guy making $7,000,000 a year is scale. Additionally you can stretch your knowledge into different markets to magnify your profits through redundant systems.

5. Read a lot, but more importantly test what you read. Warren Buffet likes to read, but I’m guessing Rich Dad Poor Dad isn’t on his bedstand. All of these marketing business self-help e-book, seminars, and so on are great — once. Too many people are addicted to them and they never get anywhere. This leads into number 6.

6. Diversify your knowledge base. Contacts are critical. Many of those 20 page sales-letter people are have created a closed sub-culture. Its asphyxiating your future by being around them all day. Go to conferences for unrelated industries, network with entrepreneurs in NYC, find out what businesses are doing in the Southern hemisphere, talk to outsourced workers in Manila. Instead of reading just Business 2.0, go pick up a copy of the Economist. You can make a damn good living just knowing the right people.

7. You have to like doing it. If you hate it, you look for reasons not to work rather than reasons to work. Life is too short to be miserable. If you are miserable it is not because your don’t have enough money — it is because you don’t do what you love.