Have you ever wanted to be or do something big, but didn’t put in the effort required to make it happen? For example, you may have aspired to become a great author or artist, but you never submitted any work to publish, get judged in contests, or even put it on a blog where it might be discovered. It’s a long shot to get noticed as it were, never mind by the right people who might support your work, with odds like those of winning the lottery. However, if you didn’t even give yourself a chance to win that lottery by doing what you must do, akin to buying a lottery ticket in the extended metaphor, who will?

The obviously obvious statement that you can’t win the lottery unless you play is what I tell myself any time I feel I’m falling short on effort to give myself chances to do something big, like get recognized for my writing, art, clothing design, poetry, or many other things I do. I’m usually not short on getting work done for which I want to be recognized. Rather, I don’t put them out enough for them to be known, never mind recognized. To extend the lottery ticket analogy, I’m fine to make money to get the lottery tickets. I just don’t buy them often enough because despite the analogy being a lottery, I approach it like a sales pitch where merit is the dominant factor for success rather than chance, so I keep refining my work rather than submitting it. In other words, I don’t buy enough tickets because I don’t feel I should unless I’ve prepared more, like analyzing recent and historical distribution of drawn numbers, when I should just get tickets without numbers drawn the last few week, or completely randomly chosen numbers, and leave everything to chance like a real lottery.

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This post is one of 70 quotes I wrote, each with an accompanying essay, in my e-book and paperback Stars I Put in my Sky to Live By, on Amazon or Smashwords (choose your price including free!).