What are our chances of winning the lottery?
“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” - Earl Nightingale
We have a tendency to overweight the probability of low-probability events and underweight the probability of high-probability events.
As a result, we put time, energy, effort, and resources into events like buying lottery tickets.
I had a scratch-off lottery ticket that I received as a birthday gift, and the average chance of winning a prize is 1 in 3.67. Those seem like pretty good odds, especially when compared to the odds of winning the Powerball drawing aren’t nearly as high.
The odds of claiming the jackpot in a Powerball drawing are 1 in 292.2 million.
Now take for example you visit your doctor and have some bloodwork done and something abnormal shows up and the results need further evaluation. Your doctor tells you that it’s a 10% chance that it is something serious.
If you are like most people, you will worry yourself until you get the results back, even though there’s a 90% chance that it isn’t serious.
If we were to look at the bloodwork example a little bit differently, maybe, we would worry less.
Here’s how that might look for the bloodwork results example for the extra evaluation:
Good / Good / Good / Good / Good / Good / Good / Good / Good / Bad
How can we use this information with the Five Pillars of Well-Being?
Let’s be aware of our tendencies to overweight small probability events and not let them worry us too much.
Let’s be aware of our underweighting tendencies and use them to our advantage.
Focus less on the long shots and more on the more easily attainable efforts.
Forward, always!