You can’t win success… it must be earned.
I never played the lottery much to begin with anyway. Here is a question to ponder: Do wildly successful people play the lottery? Does Elon Musk play the lottery? Richard Branson? I doubt it.
I played for years. Every time the pot grew large enough, several hundred million, I would drop ten or twenty dollars on it. A friend summed it up best…
“I don’t play the lottery because I think I can win. I play because it’s worth a few bucks to dream for a night.”
Isn’t that why most of us play? The dreams it inspires. I know I planned out how I would use my winnings numerous times… the people I would help, the things I would buy, the charities I would support.
Inevitably, the numbers would be announced, and my ticket would transform from all the hopes and dreams I had conjured up into a worthless piece of paper. This didn’t invoke a real emotional response from me as I never really expected to win anyway, but, like my friend had said, it was worth it to dream for a night.
So why did I stop playing? It wasn’t intentional actually. I just kind of lost interest. I didn’t even realize it was happening. Then power-ball grew to over 500 million, and I forgot to play. Then it happened again… and again.
I had to stop and think about it to realize what was happening. More importantly, why it was happening.
In retrospect, I have gone through numerous phases in my life. Over the last few years I have gone through a period of tremendous growth. This growth has been built on the foundation of the decades before it. Now I actively seek to learn, to grow. Now I set massive goals
And then the realization struck me. I had stopped playing the lottery because I no longer needed the lottery to dream big. I didn’t need it to set and work for massive goals.
It taught me you can’t win success.
Success is bought with hard, sometimes brutal, work and effort. If you aren’t willing to make sacrifices, you don’t want it bad enough.
I am responsible for where I am and no ticket, winning or otherwise, will change that. I can work for, and achieve goals as big as I want by taking action right now.
The truth? The truth is that before I wasn’t setting the right goals, and I certainly wasn’t taking massive action, to seek out what I truly wanted in life. The lottery gave me a way to dream about doing what I always wanted without taking any real steps to achieve it.
But now I am and without even realizing why, I had lost interest in playing the lottery. I don’t need the lottery to plan for massive goals. I don’t need the lottery to achieve what I want. And I don’t need the lottery to work for the life I really want.
Why should any of us wait for the lottery, or anything else outside of our control, to suddenly provide us with the life we want?
It taught me success isn’t tied to money.
There is no dollar number that makes you successful. It is so easy to fall into the trap of defining success by a numerical value but it can also lead to massive disappointment.
In the end, it’s not about money. Money provides two things, opportunity, and experiences. It doesn’t provide a feeling of success, and it doesn’t provide happiness. This is about accepting that only you are responsible for where you are in life.
It’s about acknowledging if you want to be somewhere different, that you are the only one who can make the changes necessary to get there. You.
It doesn’t really matter if you play the lottery. Play it or don’t play it, but be sure to ask yourself why you’re playing it to begin with. Is it because you aren’t taking the necessary action to achieve the life you always wanted?
It taught me that it’s easy to dream but hard to act.
It is so easy to imagine what we would do with our winnings. Why does it never cross our minds to take an actual step toward those goals regardless of whether we ever win or not? Why do we wait for some outside force to make our dreams a reality when we have the tools necessary to do it ourselves?
Dream big… take even bigger action
You have two options:
- Accept where you are in life and wait for someone, or something, to magically make it happen.
2. You can accept responsibility for where you are now and take action to get to where you want to be.
I have something that I frequently write in my journal. “I belong where I am.” It reminds me that no matter where I am in life, whether it’s massively successful or a complete failure, I belong there. I am the one who has made the decisions that have led me to where I am.
You can wish, and dream, and hope for the perfect life to be handed to you or you can accept that you are solely responsible for where you are in life.
You don’t have to wait! Take that difficult but critical first step toward the life you really want (that one you dream about when you think of what you would do if you won the lottery).
It’s your decision, but mine has been made. I belong where I am.
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About the author:
Dan has decades of experience as both a leader and mentor through his time in the military and law enforcement. His passion is taking that experience and helping others apply it to their day-to-day life in order to define and achieve personal success. Interact with him on twitter @dantruex
