A lady I know named Janine makes $30,000 per year selling fruits and vegetables she grows in her own back yard. She says she was sitting around one day trying to think of ways to make money from home so she could stay home with her boys, when one of her sons said something to his dad that turned on a light bulb in her head.

The son had asked the dad for money to buy a new video game, and the dad replied something to the effect of, “Didn’t I just give you money to buy a new video game two days ago? Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.” At that the son, an 8 year old, replied, “Well, in a way money does grow on trees,” and when asked to explain himself, went on to state that his friend’s dad grows peaches and sells the peaches for money so in a way you could say money grows on trees indirectly.

Janine found herself repeating the thought “money grows on trees” for the rest of that day, and that night she had a dream that she was at the Farmer’s market haggling over the price of some strawberries, insisting the price was way too high and that it was becoming increasingly impossible for people to eat healthily because the price for fresh fruits and vegetables was ridiculously expensive. By the time she woke up the next morning she had decided that she was going to grow fruits and vegetables and sell them for more reasonable prices than they were being sold in the grocery stores and at the local market.

She started small with tomatoes, bell peppers, squash, okra, Cantaloupe and eggplant. She read lots of books and followed expert advice and from her first crop she started making money. She’s now also growing grapes, cherries, plums, nectaries, pumpkins, potatoes, spinach, watermelon, zucchini and cucumbers to name a few and for the last few years has made at least $30,000 in profit from sale of her goods.

So, while money indeed doesn’t literally grow on trees, like Janine’s son pointed out, indirectly money does grow on trees. Maybe you can figure out a way to plant a seed and have it indirectly grow into the millions you desire or at least some extra yearly income.

In my youth there was a game we used to play where an appointed person would go around a circle of people, and pointing from person to person, would say to the first person, “Rich man”, then to the next person, “poor man,” then to the next person, “beggar man”, then to the next person, “thief”, repeating this until each person in the group had been identified as having a future as a rich man, a future as a poor man, a future as s beggar or a future as a thief. I remember always feeling panicked at the thought that I when the appointed person reached me he would be on any of poor man, beggar man or thief. It was just a silly game but I’m not sure I quite fully understood that my financial future could not be determined by being lucky to be next in line for when the appointed person reached “rich man’, or my bad luck to be in the position of having to choose between becoming a poor man, a beggar or a thief. If memory serves correctly on the rare occasions that I would join in playing this game which I tended to avoid playing out of fear that I would not be classed a rich man, I used to reason that if I couln’t be a rich man I’d rather accept the fate of a poor man than accept the fate of a beggar or a thief. But somehow, I was always lucky to end up being appointed a rich man.

What is interesting is that we played these games as children and fantasized about having lots of money when we grew up, but it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t be able to just walk out of poverty and into wealth like turning off one street and onto another. We never realized that it would take more than “intending” not to be poor, not to become a beggar and not to become a thief when we grew up, to achieve the status of “rich man”, so we didn’t go off planning how we were going to become rich because we figured everything would just automatically fall into place once we grew up.

Maybe everything falls into place automatically when you’re born into wealth; but when you’re born poor, you more often than not stay poor until you come to the realization that poverty doesn’t just up and go away one day. You actually need a plan of action for eradicating poverty and achieving wealth. And sometimes even after you make that realization, you’ve been so programmed according to the mentality of poverty that it becomes nearly impossible to believe you can change your financial situation. You’ve become convinced that there’s something about you that predestines you to a life of having nothing and you allow this mindset to sabotage your chances of achieving financial success whether consciously or subconsciously because you believe money is for other people, special people; and for people like you, people who come from nothing, financial freedom is an unattainable goal and a silly dream that will never become reality.