“We’re up all night to the sun,
We’re up all night to get some,
We’re up all night for good fun,
We’re up all night to get lucky”

• Daft Punk

This song got me thinking about luck. We underrate it so much. Whenever we see a lottery or a raffle, or some other game of chance, we behave in two different ways: some of us roll our eyes, shake heads and keep walking. While some of us think “why not?” and roll the dice.

I’ve been wondering why do people participate in lotteries in the first place? Lottery means taking on some risks for a minuscule chance of a disproportionate reward. Indeed, that chance of winning is so fractional that the expectation is to lose a lottery, to the extent that losing the lottery is almost part of the definition of lottery itself.

Just because winning the lottery is quite an unlikely scenario, does that mean we shouldn’t even participate? One thing is for sure – someone is going to win. But what if that’s us?

“Of course it was crazy for me to think that I’d be the new CEO. But I remember thinking, someone is going to be CEO!”
– Lloyd Blankfein ( CEO, Goldman Sachs)

Other successful people have also admitted the role of luck in their lives:

“Don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck…”

• Michael Lewis

According to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon:

“I’m very, very lucky. I’m lucky in so many ways. I won a lot of lotteries in life and I’m not just talking about Amazon as a certain kind of financial lottery for sure, but I have won so many lotteries. My parents were both amazing role models… In life, we get a lot of rolls of the dice, and one of the big rolls of the dice is who are your early role models.”

• Jeff Bezos

I’ve never won a lottery. As a matter of fact, I’ve never participated in one. But I think there’s a non-zero of winning it. Someone wins is every time. What if that someone could be me? ☀︎