Many people who play the lottery are in it for the money, because that is what can be won. However, the most common belief of winning the lottery is paying off debts and buying houses, cars, and toys.
Although many people do all that with their winnings, the point of playing and winning the lottery is not about how much stuff you can buy, but how it will improve your life.
Celebrity Syndrome
Many lottery winners, after getting their money, immediately go house and car hunting. They tend to buy houses that are huge, some being mansions.
This is sometimes called the Celebrity Syndrome. Most people who gain celebrity, such as actors, initially came from a middle class family or lower.
There was always only enough money to buy groceries, pay the rent and utilities, with maybe some money left over for a birthday present or two.
Others may have come from poverty level families, unable to afford food or even rent a slum apartment.
Their newfound celebrity and financial success now allows them to buy a house. So they get the biggest house they can afford. They overcompensate for what they never had but had always dreamed of.
They buy the most expensive car, not for practicality or functionality, but because it makes a good impression.
They have the money, why not use it? Big lottery winners have the same perception. They can now buy the house and car of their dreams.
Improving your life
But winning the lottery is not about living your dreams and changing your life but about improving your life and making your dreams a true reality. Changing your life is the wrong thing to do.
If you regularly buy and drink a national brand coffee and then suddenly change to the world’s most expensive coffee that comes out of the behind of a civet just because you can now afford it, that is changing your life.
If you are single and live in an apartment, then buy a ten thousand square foot home, that’s changing your life.
If you wear a watch simply to tell time, then buy a Rolex, that’s also changing your life.
Switching to a better quality and more expensive national brand coffee, buying a house that actually is sized to your single status and that works for you in layout, and buying a better quality watch that costs thirty dollars more, is improving your life.
Alleviating worry
A moderately successful writer once said, that “success is not having to worry about paying your bills.”
What he meant was that regardless of your financial status or personal situation, even if you make minimum wage, if you never sit there and worry about which bill is coming in next, which one should be paid this month or can wait until next month, or which bill you are behind on the most, then you are a successful person.
The money your make or have, the way you manage it, allows you to live worry free. If a sudden influx in money comes in, it will allow you to pay your bills on a yearly basis rather than monthly. This is not change but improvement.
That’s how lottery jackpots should be viewed.
Not as a change to your life where you actually become someone you are not, but to improve your life to make who you are more comfortable, relaxed, stress free, and worry free.
It’s not about the money itself. It is about the improvement to your life that the money represents.
It’s not that old adage that if you have the money you should spend the money. It’s about using your good fortune to make a better life for you and your family.