When I was a little boy, my dad would tell me “son, you are a winner.” It’s often impolite to talk about winning, especially where luck is involved, like the lottery. And I get that. Although, people love to play the lottery, that’s evidenced by the $70 billion Americans spend on lottery tickets each year. That’s far more than $18 B spent on sports tickets or $11B spent going to the movies.
Well, every lottery ticket is bought by someone hoping to win. Everybody, wants to win, and they imagine what it must be like to find out. In my case, it was from a phone call one evening in the middle of a typical week.
When I heard my wife’s voice, I knew within milliseconds, something profound had happened. Her voice was trembling; she said she checked the numbers 4 times before calling. Shots of electricity pulsed through me. I felt disorientated.
It was in the evening, everyone else in the office had already left so there was no one to tell. Not that I would have anyway. For one thing, it’s private. For another my hands were shaking and I was perspiring.
To this day, I do not remember driving home, but I do vividly recall being greeted at the front door as though I was an astronaut returning home from a historic missions to Mars. We methodically confirm the numbers. It’s easy, the same #s are used every time. 13 for my mom’s birthday (she died years previously from cancer), 3 for my dad’s birthday (he’ll be the first one I call later that evening), 22 for our daughter, 30 for our son, 9 for my wife’s birthday and 1 for me (I was born on the 1st of the month). The numbers match.
And maybe due to some minor OCD remaining from childhood, or maybe because I’m feeling delirious and need some grounding, I say “let’s just check again 10 times.” And that’s what we do, and each time my wife makes a check on a scrap of paper. Confirmed. Confirmed. Confirmed… 10 times.
The first call is to my dad who’s nearly 70 year’s old at the time, and who’s worked for nearly 55 years – I start by saying “Dad, you are a winner.”
I learn later, when you pick 6 numbers from a pool of 49 numbers, your chances of winning the NJ jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816. That’s 1 shot in almost 14 million.
Statistics and probabilities can be difficult to comprehend, so here’s an accurate comparison. If you had one pet turtle – the size of a laptop computer, that roamed in a pen that was a 1 mile long by ½ mile wide (that’s 14 million square ft), and one day you were flying in a helicopter over the property and you randomly threw out a Frisbee, and it landed directly on top of that turtle… that would be 1 in 14 million.
It seems really unlikely, but clearly it happens. And that got me curious about other probabilities, of things that are happening all around us. For example, do you know what the odds are for each of us being born? It’s very easy to determine, I found a study from MIT that explained a fertile woman has 100k viable eggs on average. And a man produces 12 trillion sperm over the course of his reproductive life. The probability of the right sperm meeting the right egg (to create you) is 1 in 400 quadrillion (that’s a 400, with 15 zeroes).
If even one different sperm met a different egg, you would not be reading this.
That probability is certainly difficult to comprehend, so here’s an accurate example. If you consider the surface area of ALL the oceans in all the world (70% of earth)…. and if you had just one little pet turtle with about a 1 inch shell – and that little turtle was swimming somewhere (an-nee-where) on the surface of any ocean anywhere in the world (which is about 400 quadrillion square inches), and one day you were flying in your jet on a transoceanic flight and you dropped a single postage stamp and it floated down through the clouds – and it landed on the back of THAT turtle … that would be 1 in 400 quadrillion.
And that puts the far more likely odds of winning the NJ lottery into perspective.
Which brings us back to where I began, with my dad saying “Son, you are a winner.”
He’s right, I am a winner. But not because of the NJ lottery. The truth is, I did NOT win any state lottery. I’ve actually never bought a lottery ticket. This is just an imagined scenario as mentioned above.
But I did win – the far more valuable and unimaginably impossible odds of being born, of being here – and so did you.
Which is what I’m so excited to tell you today…. “Dear Friend, you are a winner.”
Thomas – This article is a must read for everyone. I was so happy for your good fortune and even happier with the way the article ended. Thanks for sharing your insights.
Hello Len, Thank you for the kind comment. You’re another winner! 🙂