You don't need money to survive. When you learn to live life from the perspective of enjoying every moment of it...everything changes. All the normal "rules" of society no longer apply to you. You are no longer caught up in the rat race because you are living as God designed us to live. I'm an avid believer that we are all born with talents that will allow us to make a living. The problem is, it's instilled in us from early childhood that those talents are to be used to get a higher education and go work for someone else doing things we DON'T like for a large paycheck. I personally think our innate talents are most times totally unrelated to working for a paycheck but instead should be used to service someone else. Joy comes from doing something you love but in the process, also serving others. We cannot all be entrepreneurs. But we can all be serving others in whatever field we work in. How often have you seen someone in a job where they totally enjoyed what they were doing and it changed your experience? Mine was the other day at a friend's restaurant. She has a young man that works for her waiting tables and he is excellent at it. He is very polite, gets everyone everything they need and seems to genuinely enjoy his job. I was excited just watching him and before I left I made sure to compliment him on his work ethic. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing a good job. We need to stop looking for money as rewards or as the means to an ends. When you are doing what you are supposed to do and serving others in the process, the money will come. When we decided to open our salon, we had NO money....I mean negative zero. But, we didn't let that stop us. We were passionate about what we were doing. We knew we had a great idea and we knew its what God wanted us to do. So we acted like we had money. We decided what we wanted for the salon, we figured out how much it would cost, we prayed about it and we talked about it to anyone and everyone we knew that we trusted. We had so many people that loved us, believed in us, wanted the best for us AND we had an unbreakable faith that God would provide. We started seeing miracles happen. People would call and say they wanted to give us money or that they wanted to gift us supplies for the salon. We bartered with people when we could and gave them gift certificates for future services. Did I mention we had NO money? lol. But I'm here to tell you that on the day our salon opened, not only did we have everything we needed, our schedules were completely booked and we were debt free. So, I'm speaking from experience. Were there times in the process where we doubted and were concerned because we had rent to pay or car payments? Heck yeah. But, we stayed faithful, prayerful and most important we encouraged each other that the struggle wouldn't last for long. Sometimes we would cry and then laugh about how one day we would look back to those broke days. And God hasn't stopped blessing us. And we haven't stopped telling people about his blessings. We are here to serve. Not only do we service people's hair, we serve them through nurturing their spirits because we love what we do. I have another close friend who recently came up with an amazing idea. He called me to tell me he woke up at 2 am one morning and couldn't let the idea go. God was speaking to him and before long all the details were laid out. He decided to do something he had never done before. He talked about it to people he trusted. Within 24 hours someone had offered him money to get his idea underway....and I'm talking 10 G's/10 stacks...ok, in laymen's terms, ten thousand dollars! A lot of you reading my blogs know me, you know my story but for those that don't, I just want to inspire you. You and I are no different. You have the ability to experience these things but you have to first have a burning desire to follow your dreams and to serve others. In the words of Zig Ziglar, "you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great."