If You Treat "It" Like a Lottery Ticket, You'll Get Lottery Odds and Lottery Results
The recent flurry of conversation and activity around the large lottery prize converged in my head with much of the reading I've been doing about writing books, publishing, building businesses, building blogs, etc. into a principle that I think applies to many areas of life. In whatever you are looking to work on or build, if you treat "it" like a lottery ticket, you need to expect lottery odds.
The "Powerball" lottery in Minnesota (and other places) has the odds of winning at 1 in 146,107,962 with the cost of playing set at $1. In other words, low investment, nearly immediate feedback and potentially high payout, but absolutely horrendous odds that you'll win. That means that you've got a chance at the big payoff for your $1 investment, and the payoff will be nearly immediate. You buy a ticket and later this week, if you win, you'll know and be on your way. However, you've got a 99.9999993% chance of not winning. And, those odds don't change just because you buy a ticket every week. Every week you've got those same odds.
Given those numbers, your ticket per week for 40 years will net you -$2080. However, if you take that $52/yr and put it into somewhere earning 10% annually, you'll end up with $27,669 in 40 years.
So what's this got to do with anything other than proving the axim that "the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math"? Well, I keep seeing people approach starting a business, starting out blogging, writing a book, losing weight, etc. with the exact same approach. They want to know how they can invest the smallest possible level of effort and gain the results of the superstars in the given field.
If you want a 6 figure income from writing on websites, you can't expect to work for half an hour on Saturday morning for a couple of weeks and have the world beat a path to your site. Are there people on the TV talk shows who've done it? Sure. Lottery winners are interviewed too. But, even heavy lottery users still go to work every day instead of depending on buying lottery tickets (or they go bankrupt pretty quickly).
A lot of the people I hear making these statements about building content sites are American white collar workers. Most of them sank $25,000 and 4 years of full-time effort into a college education and continue to invest 40+ hours into their full-time jobs to earn a fulltime income but somehow expect that an hour a week on their blog will net the same result in a few weeks or months.
However, if you treat these things as long-term endeavors, putting in well thought out effort over the long haul, you actually will have a difficult time failing.
If the questions you're asking about an opportunity would sound "normal" when asked about lottery tickets, you've probably got the wrong approach. What topic are you using too much "lottery language" about?
