If You Won The Lottery

If you won the lottery

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

James Allen

Have you ever dreamed of winning the lottery? Most people have. And most people have heard the statistics that within five years of winning, the vast majority of lottery winners are worse off financially and emotionally. When told this information, lottery players respond in one of two ways: They would like to win anyway just to see or they are certain they would be the exception. They feel like they could handle the sudden wealth.

Psychologists tell us that by and large we are very poor at estimating the emotional satisfaction that we will gain from some future event such as winning the lottery. We tend to think that winning the lottery will solve all our problems. That if we could only pick those six little numbers correctly, life would be wonderful.

We all know the odds of actually winning are so huge that it really does not pose a realistic problem for most of us. But the phenomenon of overestimating our emotional well being from some future event is not limited to the lottery. It is a very real problem that has serious consequences in our daily lives.

We are emotional beings. While we like to think we are rational beings, most of our decisions are made emotionally. We then try to justify them with some logical story. Here is the problem. If we overestimate the emotional good that we might gain from some activity, we will engage in activities that might not be in our best interest.

We think that achieving certain goals in life will suddenly make life easy. All the problems will be solved. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we move into that new house, get that fancy new car, or find the love of our dreams then our lives will be forever changed for the better. When we think in that manner, and everyone does from time to time, we are overestimating the emotional satisfaction that comes from achieving some goal or acquiring some possession.

If you want proof, look at some of the things you have longed for and how quickly the pleasure of acquiring them faded. A great example is to watch children on Christmas day. The anticipation of the gifts is much greater than the actual gifts. Acquiring things only gives us short term pleasure. The new wears off in a hurry.

So what is the lesson here? There are two. The first is to understand that we almost always overestimate the emotional satisfaction that some future event will give us. If we are more realistic about the potential results we will quit chasing some fantasies.

The second lesson is that even if we won the lottery or achieved any other "life changing goal" it does not change us. You may win the lottery. But you will still be you. If you truly want to change your life, the change must be an inside job. Nothing you achieve on the outside will change what is on the inside.

You will always have to live with yourself. If you are not happy, it is not circumstances that you are unhappy with. It is you. Quit dreaming about some outside achievement that will change you. It cannot happen. If you want to change, change your way of thinking, then everything else will change.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud