On Friday, out of a little hope and a little despair, I bought a $1 lottery ticket. It wasn’t like the lottery was particularly high. In fact, I don’t even know what it was – just that it was over $1 million (or over $60 million is more like it) and that I figured I’d diversify into that realm since playing the 401k and other stocks is an even higher cost and about the same probability of success at this point.
Well, as you may have guessed from the odds, I did not win. Not even a dollar.
Later in the weekend, my RSS feed sent a Seth Godin post to my inbox – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/06/hope-and-the-magic-lottery.html – and it talked about putting all this hope into these quick wins that will make us rich. You know, the “if I only get my product on Oprah it will make it big” type of hope.
It was a little close to home and luckily I was in a state of mind to laugh a little, blush a little and realize that to get from point A to point B we sometimes just have to “put our shoulder to the wheel and press along.”
In a way, we all learned this back in the day of reading the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady wins the race, they would say. But, some of us like to take the short cuts only to find out that short cuts tend to be really long.
So, I will keep plodding along.
Though, I must point out that plodding also means taking at least one step a day. It might be small, but it must be taken. Sometimes I want to save up some tasks or projects or ideas for the weekend.
NO! That is more like the hare.
This posting is a step. One post a day (unless there isn’t really anything worth writing) and over time a theme develops, or a book or another grand idea.
Second step, get up off this couch and clean the dishes. Ugh!
