500 Words — Day Five: Lottery Tickets

William Greer
3 min readJan 13, 2022

Lottery tickets. A good way to lose money in hopes of quick and easy money in return. There’s no such thing as quick and easy money without the application of extremely good luck. The one thing about luck is that you can’t control it.

Luck is not the problem with the lottery, but the goal of the lottery is the problem with the lottery. The lottery raises money for the party holding the lottery. In the modern American lottery, the state operates the lottery as a means of raising capital. The lottery operates as a stupidity tax with a variable tax rate and for a lucky few, life-changing “refunds”. In the long run, however, if you had an infinite number of lottery tickets that you had to pay for, you would lose money regardless of your luck. Fortunately, no one is stuck having to purchase an infinite number of lottery tickets.

Is a lottery winner a successful person? What makes a successful person successful? Is it wealth? Is it hard work? Is it both? Is it neither? A janitor or farm laborer would considered a hard working person, but neither is associated with success. Folks that have rich family members that leave large inheritances aren’t considered successful. I’ve often seen hard work and wealth together associated with success, but there is no hard objective generic definition for one’s overall life’s outcome. But to oversimplify things, lets reduce success to hard work and wealth. Is the lottery winner a successful person? It depends.

If they work hard on acquiring their money to purchase lottery tickets and get lucky, they still put hard work into the equation. They might be not very educated in the mathematical concept of probabilities, but they have acquired wealth with hard work as the means of obtaining a chance at that wealth. But why focus on lottery winners? Most successful people are lottery winners, they just don’t think of themselves as lottery players.

A lot of self-made people either invest their way or build their way to their fortunes. Along the way, they “buy” lottery tickets with the hope of one of them hitting and getting rich. Consider modern day influencers. Let’s pretend that the work that they put into making social posts and videos is “hard work”. Anyone could do that job, but most people don’t make a successful career out of social media. Those that get lucky (and become viral) become successful. Each piece of media is a lottery ticket. The cost is the time to create that media. The odds of winning are very low. But when you win big you become successful, as long as you spend that new garnered attention correctly. The same thing applies to picking stocks and investing (I’m looking at you Bitcoin). The same thing applies to entrepreneurship, particularly in startups. There’s a reason venture capitalists spread their money out in a lot of little investments in many startups rather than a few. It’s because they want more lottery tickets.

Most successful people don’t like to attribute their success to luck however. They overrate the contribution that hard work makes as opposed to their good fortunes. Unless you are a lottery winner, most folks like to attribute 100% success to their work ethic rather than good fortunate. But most of these folks were at the right place at the right time. Change some external variable and it is very likely that person never reaches the heights that they reach when the stars align. You might be thinking I’m complaining because I’m not super wealthy, but the truth is that a huge portion of my wealth can be attributed to being lucky (I’m looking at you again Bitcoin).

So what did we learn today? Get as many lottery tickets as you can get your hands on. Just make sure those lottery tickets have better payouts than the ones you are used to getting for Mega Millions.

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William Greer

Full time software engineer, part time experimentalist, ready to build the future one small step at time.