Locating the optimum home based business for yourself is not the simplest thing in the world.

When you are able to optimistically search to pinpoint it, you will have taken an important step towards your own personal success and financial freedom.

For you the best home based business does not necessarily mean the most profitable in terms of money. It also is not the job that offers the best prospects of advancement. Is it?

I would be willing to bet that the best business for you is the one that propels you towards your own clearly defined definition of success. Whatever is that definition?

In a poll I read a few years ago a high percentage, I think it was seventy or eighty percent, of the respondents said that as little as $200 per month additional income from a small business would put them over the hump and into their financial comfort zone? If this is you, fine.

Most people define success as having a lot of money, or having a lot of people look up to you. Is this you? I would rather you looked up to yourself with a quiet, secure confidence.

Remember that on average, over 50 percent of all million dollar lottery winners have had to file for bankruptcy within five years of winning. They won the big bucks for the wrong reasons.

While these are valid criteria for success, or are they? They leave out too many other variables that make up human happiness.

No one, who is mature, really wants to make money for money itself. After all, who wants to spend their lives just accumulating paper?

Look what it did for Howard Hughes. He lived and died like an animal.

Paul Getty said he was the most miserable man on Earth when he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and healthy.

Bill Gates now finds that he is finally happy giving away money. Nice way to be happy, no?

We work for money because it represents a whole lot of the other things that we want in life. Money helps us take care of our basic needs, such as food, clothing, shelter, fun and financial security.

It also gives us the capacity to do things and go places, if we wish, that we otherwise could not have engaged in.

In other words, money gives us possibility. If it can provide anything beyond that, however, is open to question. The trick is to find out our possibility in ourselves.

When looking for the top home based business to engage in, what you can earn from it is definitely an important consideration. What you truly need from it is the important consideration

Please do not neglect all the other aspects as well. For instance, will you be happy operating such a business?

Would you able to really sink your, choppers, teeth into it? If you take a person who was meant to be a teacher and place him in a job that denies him his dream, he will be unhappy.

No matter how well he or she may be compensated in money. Remember the examples above.

Similarly, take someone who absolutely wants nothing to do with children and place him or her in a classroom, and they will probably be miserable whatever the size of their paycheck is.

Before anything else then, take stock of your inclinations. Follow your heart. But do not follow it over a cliff.

The top home business for you is one that is in line with what you love and can really do.

Such a business may not become the top moneymaker in the world, but in all likelihood it will succeed.

After all, if you engage in the work that you love, it will not be work at all. It will be a labor of love. If it turns out to be the top moneymaker that is just one of those things but surely not everything.

You will most likely find happiness in pursuing such an occupation. Being happy with what you do, you will invariably end up doing an excellent job. Sometimes a great one.

This will be your key to greater financial rewards. Would you rather have money and happiness both at the same time?

As Mr. Myagi said in the Karate Kid Movie, balance in everything in life. Understand this and you will do fine.