All of this is laid out as a tidy, workable, day-by-day plan. Each section is stuffed with practical advice and tips on topics such as office leases, shared office space, moving to your new office, working with virtual assistants, writing and using a tips booklet, and giving a teleseminar.

Landers’ book suffers from a shortcoming shared by all books of this type: by aiming to apply to everyone, it isn’t a perfect off-the-rack fit for anyone. Of course, if you can’t think creatively enough to customize generic advice to your own situation, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur at all. But this underscores one problem I see with Landers’ unflaggingly positive approach. He completely dodges the most important question a home-based business person should ask if he or she has “a home office from hell:” namely, “should I even be an entrepreneur? Is the state of my office telling me something?”

This leads me to the aspect of the book that irritated me. Over and over, Landers talks about the category of entrepreneur he tags “Lifestyle Gurus” being people who are “sitting at the computer in their underwear” or who want to work all day in their pajamas, or a sweat suit, or whatever. This is a clichéd stereotype that I find inaccurate and offensive. I have a one-person, home-based business.

Throughout my life, every aptitude, personality and vocational test I took asserted that I had every personality trait required to be successfully self-employed. These traits are quantifiable, and the most important such trait is a strong, even overpowering, sense of self-discipline and initiative. I prefer working at night, but I get up at exactly the same time every day.

I never slog around in pajamas, grubbies, or underwear. I’m up, dressed, bed made, ready for the day, and working — seven days a week. I can say with perfect confidence that the same thing is true of my self-employed next door neighbor. To anyone who thinks for one moment that being self-employed or an entrepreneur means you can sit around like a slob all day because there’s no one to see you, my advice is, “Don’t quit your day job.”

Maybe Landers sees a lot of unsuccessful would-be entrepreneurs who spend all day in their pajamas or underwear, and hasn’t considered this a clue as to why those entrepreneurs aren’t doing so well. Or possibly, since Landers confesses on page 124 that he’s terrified of speaking in public, he may use “that thing where you think of everyone in their underwear before you do a presentation” and has gotten stuck in it.

I am unquestionably one of Landers’ “Lifestyle Gurus,” and I run a small publishing company, so I never meet “clients.” Nevertheless, if I got a phone call and needed to meet someone important within twenty minutes, rest assured that I would not have to get dressed first. The kind of internalized professional attitude that is mandatory for entrepreneurs can’t be selectively applied. You live your life that way, and you become an entrepreneur because your standards are higher than those of anyone who would hire you. I won’t even get into the importance of self-discipline and consistent routines for health and morale, both absolutely essential for a self-employed person to maintain. If you seriously want to work from home, no conference calls in jammies for you!