I am about to relate how I was taught to view work and money. As I describe what I call theUsual Life Cycle, see if you can relate to the various points of this cycle.

First, there is our birthday, which is often a day of great joy for our parents and extended family. That day will follow you for the rest of your life. It is a day where parents fall in love with their child and begin to imagine their future. They have great aspirations for that child, and hope that this child will one day grow up to be someone great, with wealth, happiness, and health.

Parents are constantly setting goals for their children, tweaking them as their children express interest in different areas of the world. While they want the best for their child, it can also be said that parents are pushing an agenda of their own, one that includes traditions and culture norms. It can be hard to accept that your children might turn to a different path and a unique set of dreams all their own, but it happens often, because children are designed to dream big.

As a child grows up, he or she will begin to understand the world around them, in a carefree nature. The greatest dream of a human being starts in the mind of a little child. We begin to dream as little children with no inhibitions. Sometimes the sky is not even the limit as we dream of exploring space as an astronaut, and to land on Mars. There is a faith and wonder that children have, which adults often lose. Still, it is that faith that is so critical to achieving those dreams.

The Bible also talks about the faith needed to have a good relationship with God and enjoy the blessings he offers. It talks of a child-like faith, which is a critical component for every one of his believers.Unless you be as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 18:3)

In a similar way, our dreams are most believable when we are children. As children, our dreams seem realistic. We are not inhibited by our thoughts or self-doubts, and we are not discouraged by reality checks, simply because they don’t yet exist in our world. We are free to dream, and whatever it is that we dream of, our parents typically feed those dreams, until we start asking for something more substantial to bring those dreams into reality.

Usually, this shift happens just as we enter kindergarten or first grade. The same parents that encouraged us to dream big dreams are going to be the same people who now start to educate us on what the real world is like, bursting the bubble of our dreams to scale down our expectations for the future.

Those same parents, who had the high aspirations and hopes for their new little baby, suddenly begin to accept defeat and concede that their hopes were just that: hopes and dreams. Everybody knows that hopes and dreams keep us moving forward, but often those hopes and dreams remain unfulfilled. It becomes a source of frustration and regret as we focus on doing what society expects, instead of fulfilling the purpose that calls to us.

As we grow up, even from that early elementary education, we are taught to obey our parents and to be a good student, as we complete a prescribed number of years of education (anywhere from 12–15 years) to prepare us to enter the workforce and get agood job. Somewhere along the line, our aspirations start getting downsized as well, because we look at the enormous task of achieving our original dreams. It becomes a daunting task, and our excitement d