To borrow an illustration from a 1909 children's story by Frank L. Baum, "Hope is what makes us believe that the yellow brick road will lead to the Emerald City." Having a positive belief system and realistic, sustainable goals has a powerful effect on the future by feeding positive cycles of empowerment. A negative belief system, on the other hand, has the opposite effect in creating expectations of failure and misfortune.

One reason people come to expect failure is that they continually set unrealistically high and unobtainable or unsustainable goals for themselves, and thus experience frequent failure. Over time, this history engenders a belief system that says, in a nutshell, "nothing I do matters."

Julian B. Rotter's Expectancy Theory of Motivation is a widely held Social Learning Theory that emphasizes individual control over one's destiny. In the United States strong individualism leads to a need to explain our actions as ways of getting something for them or satisfying some need, or in other words that, "My effort makes a difference." This is an important Core Belief, but, as discussed below, this paradigm, which has strong roots in the U.S., is not a characteristic of all cultures.

The true story below is a sad illustration that highlights the frustration created in one young man's life when he was squeezed into a cultural system that didn't value reaching for dreams. It highlights the human need for growth and creative expression. This importance is expressed well by author, motivational speaker, and musician, Dom Famularo.

On an out of town trip, I found my self with a day off. As I was walking, I noticed about 50 people crowded around a large painting. I got to the perimeter of the group and looked to see what work of art was causing such a fuss. I was expecting something striking, something wildly imaginative or bold. After all, this painting, whatever it was, had commanded the biggest audience at the show.

But when I looked at it, I was surprised, mystified, and disappointed. The painting consisted of a bunch of circles. The circles painted in the bottom right hand corner were thick black ones. The circles in the middle of the canvas were thinner, but then they started leading to another section, where they got thicker again and sank down toward the bottom of the canvas.

The path of black circles rose and fell on the painting, inexplicably getting randomly thicker and thinner, at least the way I saw it, and then finally rising to the top of the painting. At the top, these black circles started taking on a very thin orange glow, which seemed to jump out of the painting, because of the painting's otherwise lack of color.

The people around me were going, "oooh, aaah," apparently very impressed with what they were seeing.

I looked again. Was I missing something here? This was nothing to "oooh and aaah" about, I thought. This was something my 7-year old nephew could slap down in a half-hour, except that I think my 7-year old nephew would come up with something more imaginative than simply brushing a bunch of black circles on canvas.

Yes, I was thinking, my nephew could do much better. "Who painted this? Stevie Wonder?" I felt like shouting out. And then I looked at the price tag on the painting. Yow! It was one of the most expensive pieces of "art" at the fair.

It seemed like a mockery of art, rather than art itself. Is that what it was supposed to be? A Joke? A cynical commentary on art? By that time, I had to ask, because the curiosity over this elementary form of paint splattering had captured my attention.

I'll bet that's what it's about, I told myself. It's that non-art art, the art that's supposed to make you think about art, without actually looking artistic in its own right.

But I was surprised again, when the organizer of the art show told me a completely different story about the painting.

There was a boy, age 13, who dreamed of being a painter. But he was the child of a farmer living in a Communist country. Painting wasn't a career option. He would have to be a farmer, and he would have to forget about painting. The family didn't have the money to buy paints, and he didn't have the luxury of wasting time in front of a canvas when there was always so much work to do.

But the boy knew he had to be a painter, so he took this canvas, and sketched with charcoal a thick black circle on the bottom right hand corner. Every year, he'd go back to that canvas and add more circles. The circles became the way he expressed his frustration, his satisfaction and dissatisfaction with life and his place in it. With one color and one shape (the circle), he was still able to vary his expression through the use of texture and thickness and the placement of the circles on the canvas.

Over the years, the circles rose and fell with his mood, darkening as his optimism dimmed, lightening up as he felt hope.

The boy eventually became a man, and he eventually found time and money to paint with other colors and on other canvases. But he kept this original canvas of his with him, and over the years, he used it as a kind of visual journal of his life. Toward the end of his life, he moved out of his Communist homeland and into a world where individual freedom and artistic expression were allowed to flourish. He could paint any time he felt like painting.

His circles rose, and in the end, took on that orange glow. He painted that last bright circle just a few days before he died. He was 93.

"Oooh, aaah!" I said.

I saw it now. The beauty of the painting I had mocked was right there in front of me. I just needed the context to see it correctly. I was looking at it from my point of view, a point of view that didn't allow me to see the true nature of the artist's vision!

Yes, this was a wonderful piece of art, a work of passion and deep expression. It was a window on one man's soul, and at first I couldn't see it, because my own window was too small.

Famualro went on to explain that he was operating from a different paradigm.

Think of the (paradigm) as a window we see life through which sometimes needs to be altered. Maybe we've gotten so used to looking out a window with a shade always half-drawn, that we've mistaken our limited view as the complete picture of what's outside our world. Maybe we have forgotten that there is a big part of the outside world we can't see behind the partially drawn shade. And in order to get the big picture, we will need to shift our paradigm by adjusting that shade.