Becoming an entrepreneur requires a transformation, a change from taking responsibility for a single or series of tasks to taking responsibility for the entire venture.

The bootstrap entrepreneur can almost never make this transformation all at once. Just as your new venture will grow slowly so will you, and maybe that's for the best.

Here are some thoughts about the process:

1. Take baby steps. I know someone who quit smoking in a day-successfully! Few of us can or should try. Life altering transformations are rarely split second affairs even if the decision to change came all at once. The same can be said for starting your small business.

2. Tomorrow begins today. There's no way to make progress without getting started, however. Even if you work a full-time job and can't put your full time into a new venture (been there, done that!) focus on a way you can get started and keep the momentum building.

3. Dream freely. Walking the boardwalk and sitting in a coffee shop in a large hotel during our recent Ocean City, MD, excursion, my wife and I did plenty of this. While it may seem to some the opposite of taking action, there is a huge difference between dreaming actively with your life-mate about the future and your goals and talking incessantly about the business you want to start with anyone who will listen at a family or social occasion.

4. Remain focused. One of the ways to do some of the things I'm talking about, bringing the dreaming, planning, action and momentum parts of the equation together, has to do with developing a fixed goal to shoot for (See "Building patterns for success".) This will help you navigate the hurtles without loosing site of the finish line.

5. Get to know the new you. There are certain values and priorities you have learned to accept based on your career choices and life decisions thus far. Your new life as a bootstrap entrepreneur will have a new set of values and priorities, some in conflict with the old. We're not talking about core values like your sense of right and wrong but those associated with who you are and where you are headed. Just as you won't necessarily be able to quit your present job tomorrow, your old values simply cannot be jettisoned over night. Instead you'll have to integrate the new ones as you go along, incrementally becoming the entrepreneur (and person) you want to be.