"You will get a good education and then you will become a successful medical doctor!" (or lawyer, or engineer, etc.)
Why do parents want their children to take up a particular profession or to own their own business? Because they love them and want them to be successful? Well yes… but…
What if you feel called by your soul to do other work? Perhaps you feel called to work within a Sikh organization that is working for change in the world. Perhaps you feel called to be an artist or a writer? There are so many possibilities.
And where will all of the Granthis (both men and women!) come from in the next 20 years? Will they always be immigrants? Will they always be paid minimum wage? What about Sikh organizations creating change in the world that need talented marketing directors, technology directors, accountants or lawyers?
Most Sikh parents want a certain profession for their children so that they can make a lot of money, because, in their eyes, that is the definition of success. The problem comes when the work you are doing is not in alignment with what your soul was put on earth to deliver to mankind.
Looking a bit more deeply, the desire underlying these parental wishes is not their children’s soul.
My experience has been that as long as you work for money, your life becomes, to a large part, about money. For example, as a doctor you end up thinking, "I must see 24 patients a day so I can earn N dollars. How can I speed up my office throughput and spend less time with each patient?" When money is the goal, you are in a position of figuring out how you can GET it. But actually, that is a false premise. Whenever you are out to GET anything, you live a life of pressure, stress and hassle. It ends up making you old before your time. And in this way we see children turning into their own parents.
But we are not our parents. We are we! We have our own destiny, and it is a destiny to serve this planet and it’s people. Anyway, you cannot "get" anything and you cannot "make money." Only governments make money. 
What can you make? Nothing. Sat Kartar already makes everything. Everything is delivered to us according to the destiny written on our forehead. What we can do is gain skills and then use them to serve. When one’s priority is to offer one’s skills, gifts and talents to the Guru in service to humanity, and the desire for personal gain falls away; it is at that point that REAL success begins. What is success anyway? Success is that you have fulfilled the contract your soul made with God when it incarnated into this body: i.e., to deliver the thing it came into the world to deliver. That is, in fact, the "true path" of one’s life.
Success and grace automatically bring prosperity. What is prosperity? Prosperity is not having a large pile of money in the bank. Prosperity is when everything you need is at hand at exactly the moment you need it; when all your affairs are arranged; when you always have enough to share with others, and when you live with grace and dignity in your life.
As parents, let our prayers be to raise a saint or a giver, not to make another doctor or lawyer. As children let our prayer be to have the strength and commitment to develop our intuition and then use that intuition to fulfill our destiny to serve the planet and its people in the way we are best suited to do that.
Discover your destiny and then live to it. All your needs will be pre-fulfilled before you can even think of them. Your life will be filled with prosperity, love and peace. Those are the true treasures of life. – Guruka Singh
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