How to win the lotto

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Happy Sunday and thanks for taking the time to open this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

This past week for me felt pretty slow, but throughout the week I was able to spend some quality time with some good friends who I hadn’t seen in a while so I’ve been really grateful for that opportunity. Good people really make a good life.

In other news, I’m still working on getting the Youtube channel up and running, so you’ll hear from me in the next few weeks, with a regular cadence of posting. I need to take my own advice and develop a bias to action because it has kinda felt like I’ve gotten stuck in the planning phase of Youtube because of anxiety and whatnot. I’m taking the plunge soon though so watch this space!

How do I win the lotto?

Full disclosure, I’m not going to tell you anything new today, and I don’t have any secret method to win the lotto. No cheating, no increased chances - I’m not reinventing the wheel here. In fact, as you read, I want you to scale down your idea of what the “lotto” is, and think of it as just something that you long for. Something big, but something just out of reach.

At the office, I joke with a co-worker all the time about how it would be so great to win the lotto, and we talk about all the plans that we have for coming into that much money. Would you quit your job? Would you keep doing what you’re doing and not tell anyone? What’s the first thing you would buy?

Those are the kinds of questions that we toss around, just like you if you were to ponder winning the lotto. At the end of the conversation though, the question always becomes - so when’s the last time you bought a lotto ticket?

To win, you first have to play

The answer to that question? “Never.” Or maybe, “a few years ago”.

Point is, I’ll probably never win the lotto, because I don’t play. I don’t take that risk because frankly, the odds suck and it’ll end up being a waste of money 99% of the time. Easiest $2 down the drain.

But my perspective on all that changed when someone 2 degrees away from me won the lotto. Hundreds of millions of dollars for a $2 ticket. Now why wasn’t I playing this whole time?

Maybe not the lotto, but give something a chance

Now although it might seem like it, I’m not here to tell you to go and buy a lotto ticket. The odds of you sending money down the drain by doing it are super high. Especially for $2 a ticket, the chances of converting $2 to $200,000,000 are slim to none.

A few months ago, when I was in Las Vegas, I learnt the same lesson. But what I realized is that in life, there’s a positive correlation between risk and reward. The bigger you bet, the bigger you can win (and the bigger you can lose too, by the way). You really can’t win big unless you bet big. But if you give something a chance - a real chance - the possibility of winning big opens up.

Throughout my life, I’ve found the most rewarding things in life come when I made decisions that might have seemed big in the moment, but I knew were right for me. In those moments where you’re scared to make a decision, but your gut is telling you that it’s the right decision for you, that’s where you find your millions.

Go win your own personal lotto

In life, we’re often scared to make big decisions that entail a lot of risk. We’re often scared to do things that shake up the status quo and send us in a whirlwind. We’re often scared to make mistakes, and I’m a huge victim of that risk averse mentality.

I’m a very calculated risk taker, so not being able to have all the options laid out in front of me is pretty frightening. If you’re playing your own personal lotto, but you don’t even know how much you stand to win, you really get scared of the prospect of even playing. But as I said, in your own life, you will never win if you don’t play.

Not only will you never have a chance if you don’t take that risk, but you’ll also never know what challenges you’ll have to overcome if you always play it safe. You’ll never experience the things that you want to experience or become the person that you want to become if you don’t give yourself the opportunity to do it.

Conclusion

Life is a lotto. Plain and simple. From the moment you were conceived, the family you’re born into, the hand you’re dealt, the decisions you make, the contexts you grow up in and the people that come into your life and help you to make decisions and shape you into who you are - it’s all by chance.

By the very nature of it being a lotto, there are winners and losers. Clearly. We can see that on a day to day basis in this cruel world that we live in.

However, there’s a couple things that we can control - and one of them is the risks that we’re willing to take and the effort that we’re willing to put in to back those decisions. If you bet on yourself, take a risk on yourself and put in the work to achieving what it is that you set out to achieve, you’re not really playing the lotto at all.

The first part - taking the risk - is all you need to get over. The rest is about trusting yourself and putting in the work. For me, I’ve never bet on myself and lost. I trust myself to do the things that I want to do, and to accomplish the things in life that I want to.

That’s how you win the life lotto. Take the risk and bet on you. You can do it.

Until next Sunday,
JLOWE

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