Seth's Blog : Seeing the lottery

Seeing the lottery

At least the Powerball tells the truth.

In a state run lottery, the deal is very simple: You pay your money, you take your chances. The government randomly chooses a winner and the winner gets a big prize and everyone else gets nothing.

But there are lotteries all around us, hidden in plain sight.

There is the lottery of higher education. You spend 12 years of your life, dancing with school and your parents, trying to fit in all the way, assuming that the prize of a famous college is the reward.

But these famous colleges acknowledge that they get three or four or five or even ten qualified applicants for every one they admit. Your effort is the ticket, but the prize is hardly assured. It’s a lottery.

Even the Olympics is a lottery. 10,000 people give up a decade or more to get proficient at a sport, and on any given day, 100 of them could win. But only one does. The same is true for book publishing and the record business.

LinkedIn is a lottery. There are hints and clues and role models about how you’re supposed to present and contribute and click and fit in or stand out, and sometimes, someone gets a prize. It’s pretty clear that Facebook and TikTok are lotteries as well. The small prizes are called friends and followers, even though these folks aren’t actually your friends and they’re probably not following you. And the big prizes are a temporary sort of fame or authority. That’s fine, but we should go into it with our eyes open.

Don’t buy more tickets than you can afford.

If it’s really important, choose a path that involves less luck.

Don’t give lottery winners more credit than they deserve.

If you win the lottery, remind yourself you won the lottery. Skill might help, but it’s not the driving force.

Most of all, call it a lottery. Once we name it properly, it puts our effort and expectations into perspective.