Be Your Own Powerball; The Odds are Way Better

Before you rush out at the last minute to grab your “winning” ticket for tonight’s billion dollar drawing, consider betting on yourself for a change.

Did you know that your odds of winning the $1.5 Billion Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million?  What if you invested in better odds?

Ever want to be an Olympian?  You could do it!  If you follow the logic of everyone has a chance, the odds of making it are about one in one half million.  Staggeringly better odds than the elusive Powerball.

Maybe you moonlight karaoke and local theater and are waiting for your big break?  Well, if by break, you mean something really big, the truth is that you have a better chance of being hit by a satellite than by fame (www.cracked.com/blog/5-awful-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-actor/

Dreaming about making it in the NFL?  The odds of high school senior player who go on to be drafted by an NFL team, about nine in 10,000 (or 0.09 percent).  That’s about the chance you have an IQ above 150.  By the way, the average IQ of Ph.D. students is 130! (www.norwichcsd.org/downloads/prosportsodds.doc)

Were you born to be part of the WWE (wrestling !!!)?  In 2011, WWE was getting around 2,000 wrestler applications a week, from 14 different countries.  About 5 were expected to actually make the main WWE roster. (www.wrestlingnews.net/how-do-you-get-in-the-wwe)

Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like me and waiting for your big break to be discovered by Oprah and have a best selling memoir (okay…best selling wannabe) and were born to write about absolutely everything?   

Apparently I’m not alone…more than 80 percent of Americans would like to be an author.  Google estimates 130 million books have been published in human history (I’m in that rank!)

The odds of any author making it big are a long shot.  Nielson Bookscan reported in 2004 that of 1.2 million books tracked, only 25,000 – barely more than 2 percent – sold more than 5,000 copies. (http://williamdietrich.com/the-writers-odds/)

Okay, now where was I going with all this?  If you’re willing to dream big on a ticket that spits out on a quick pick, why wouldn’t you at least entertain the thought of going after other dreams…while with still daunting odds of succeeding, the odds are are way better than discovering the meaning of life through a 1.5 billion dollar ticket.

So, instead of thinking about what you’re going to do if you win the lottery, consider what you will actually do to make your real dreams come true!

And yes, I’ll probably grab a few tickets before the day is over or jump in a pool at work…I’m not gonna be that one person that said it could never happen!  After all, I’m still working on my next best selling novel J