Millions of people play the lottery all over the globe and the one thing they have in common is that they know they could win a life-changing sum of money by doing so.
But there’s more to the lottery than just winning a load of cash. Much like quotes from Walt Whitman, there are some important life lessons you can learn from the lottery and we’ve highlighted three of the key ones.
Read our advice and then put our tips into practice.
1. Your odds of success are improved by partaking
If you try then you might succeed and if you don’t try then you’ve no chance of success. It sounds simple but it’s a lesson we often forget in life.
The takeaway from this is that your odds of success are improved exponentially by partaking in the thing you’re interested in. It’s something you can learn from playing the lottery, where buying a ticket means you might win and not buying a ticket means you’ll only lose.
Many of us are more afraid of failure than we are driven by success. We fear the thing we want to do is beyond us and this holds us back, so we miss out on opportunities.
Plenty of people think it’s pointless playing the lottery because it’s too hard to win. But someone wins and playing is incredibly straightforward. For starters, it takes no time at all to learn how to buy lottery tickets online and very little effort to partake in a game.
And the rewards of partaking can be immense. For example, if you decide to play the US lottery online then you give yourself the chance to win $1,000 a day for life. Now, you might not win this (or another lottery prize) but if you don’t play then you definitely won’t win it.
So, take a lesson from the lottery and partake in the things you want to. Why? Because the fear of failure is much less enduring than the misery of missed opportunities.
2. There’s much greater strength in numbers
Sports club managers often talk about there being “no I in team”. It’s a somewhat overused term but that doesn’t stop it from being true. Nor does it render the message irrelevant.
The point is that the more people you have involved in a venture the greater the likelihood is that you’ll succeed. It’s a lesson that’s not only evident in sports but also in the lottery, particularly when it comes to using syndicates.
Most of us enjoy the idea of having our own success. It’s something that’s ours, that we earned without needing to lean on other people — it’s about independence. But thinking too individualistically can water down our chances of achieving this success.
Lots of people consider that playing the lottery is a solitary pursuit. You buy your ticket. You collect your winnings. But when you cut out the “y” and focus instead on “our” being the participants then you’re mathematically more likely to succeed.
Put it this way. We all know the more lottery tickets we buy the greater the odds are of us having a winning one. So why wouldn’t you expand this principle? If you work with one, two, ten or twenty extra people then the chances of winning are much greater than when you play alone.
In short, if you want to have a greater chance of winning the lottery then you should form a lottery syndicate. And if you want to boost your odds of achieving your goals then you should work collectively with others.
3. You need to invest your money wisely
It probably doesn’t take a genius to tell you that wasting your money isn’t a great idea. But it’s not always as easy as that. Why? Because what exactly is waste?
Is it a waste of money to play the lottery and win big? Is it a waste of money to invest in a bond and for the company behind that bond to collapse?
While it’s impossible to always know exactly what constitutes a waste of money, it’s generally informative to look at examples from real people and see what went wrong for them. And there are plenty of examples of lottery winners who lost millions.
Sherif Girgis is perhaps the best example of a lottery winner who made bad investments. Girgis won AU $30 million AUS in 2007, when he was just 23. He then proceeded to lose his money through a series of failed investments.
Here are some of the highlights (or lowlights) of Girgis’ failed investments:
• Lost cash on an 80ft luxury catamaran he purchased for $896,000
• Lost money on a nightclub he bought for $2.6mn
• Lost a total of $1mn on a pub he acquired
The lesson here from playing the lottery is that you need to invest your money wisely because if you don’t then you could end up losing it all.
We’ve given you three important life lessons that you can take from playing the lottery. So, put them into practice and you’ll hopefully find yourself leading a more successful life.
