Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

Takarakuji: Would You Queue For Lottery Tickets?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

There is a street close to the centre of Hiroshima where there are two competing takurakuji booths that sell Japanese state lottery tickets with prizes amounting to several oku yen (ichi oku, or 1 oku = 100,000,000).

On weekends when the prize money has been racheted up you often see long queues of folk lining up to by tickets, while old geezers in blue uniforms bellow through megaphones to bring in more losers.

Losers! 

Harsh, but true, don’t you think? Would you spend a good part of a precious Saturday morning lining up to buy a few state lottery tickets? The odds on your winning the big prize are so poor, the likelihood so remote, that you really ought to be doing something better with your life.

But just suppose you did win… :mrgreen: What would you do?

Would you give up whatever it is you do for a living?

Why?

Probably because you are not following your passion… Here’s a quote from a fine blog post I just read, by Alister Cameron:

“If Bill Cosby won the state lottery, would he retire from show business? Would Barbra Streisand quit singing? Would Shaq O’Neil quit playing basketball? Not even if he won the biggest lottery in the world. And almost nothing could have kept George Forman out of the boxing ring.”

The blog is actually about goal setting, and why people who are following their passion don’t need to place so much emphasis on setting goals because their passion leads them on to achieve great things almost, as it were, on autopilot…

They certainly don’t need to spend their Saturday mornings lining up to buy lottery tickets - and neither do you, if you follow your passion!

Read the rest of Alister Cameron’s blog post.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com