Winners and Losers: Powerball edition

By Stuart J. Moskovitz

Well, yesterday the powerball numbers were drawn and no one in New Jersey had the winning ticket. In fact, no one I know had the winning ticket. Today the social media is filled with declarations of how the people who spent money on the tickets are “losers.” The people who are saying that, however, are wrong — dead wrong. Those people who bought a ticket had very little chance of winning a big prize. Realistically, the chances were very close to nonexistent. But, assuming that they didn’t bet the mortgage money on their lottery tickets, the people who bought those tickets weren’t losers, they were winners. The people who just said to themselves there was no chance of winning were, in reality, results notwithstanding, the people who lost. They lost because they failed to dream. They lost because they refused to believe in the seemingly impossible. They lost because they looked at overwhelming odds and declared defeat. They lost because they refused to reach for the unreachable star.

A potted plant goes through life without dreaming. It gets watered, or it doesn’t. It gets light, or it doesn’t. And it lives or dies according to whether or not it gets what it needs. That’s not the way humans are built. We are built to dream. We are built to strive. We are built to reach beyond ourselves. We are built to hope. Even if it is something as simple as $2.00 for a powerball ticket, those people who spent those $2.00 were winners. For hours or days before the numbers were drawn, they got to dream. They got to think about what they would do with the money they were realistically never going to see. They got to imagine. They got to hope. They got to reach.

In the end, the quality of life is never measured by what we have. The quality of each life is measured by the height of our dreams, the energy behind our reach, the willingness to suspend probability for the expectation that nothing great follows mathematical probability, that no great accomplishment in the history of mankind ever came by way of following the proven path.

Posted: November 29th, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: Powerball lottery | Tags: Powerball, Stuart J. Moskovitz, Winners and Losers | Comments Off on Winners and Losers: Powerball edition

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