Your Odds Are

  I’ve been writing for over a decade.  Few pieces make their way to being bona-fide published for more reasons that I can cite; or speculate.  But I stumbled upon an article that mention the likelihood of winning the lotto paled other possibilities in life of happening.  One such comparison was being published in the New York Times.  It cited its professional research odds as being one in 220 of writing a New York Times bestseller, and of course you have to be an author; so don’t go off thinking all you need to do is tape crazy Uncle Earnest’s rantings about fighting in WWII (that’s double U double U two) and transcribe them into a ticket to fame and glory.  Then, those odds are just slightly better than odds of having an appendage cut off by a chain saw; (one in 4,464) again you must be operating the said chain saw, ( I think), and not a real live re-enactment of Texas chainsaw massacre (or as Arlo Guthrie would say, mass-ah-cree, if you happen to be an Alice’s Restaurant fan.)  Those odds are only slightly tipping in your favor over common concerns as finding a four leaf clover (one in ten thousand) so luck isn’t so difficult to find after all, if you’re persistent. On an ancillary note Malcom Gladwell mentioned in his book Outliers that 10,000 seems to be the magical  number of hours that shaped the Beatles into the awesome group that commanded the world of Rock and Roll for a decade; oddly that number of hours of dedication seems to create the personification of expert in most fields.

   How about fretting over dying in an asteroid apocalypse? Well chances are just one in 12,500 of that happening, and let me tell you there are thump of asteroids out there just itching to go a round with good ol’ mother earth you betcha. Getting murdered brings you a chance of one in 18,000 which means in a modern metropolitan city of over 54,000, well…it’s like that silly saying; if one in four of you is going to go insane, and three of your friends seem ok…do the math.   On the bright side you have more of a chance to write that bestseller than date a supermodel (one in 88,000) but frankly I’ve seen a lot of supermodel interviews and most of them don’t have the sense God gave a stump; once those looks are gone brother…they’re gone man, they’re gone.  Then I wondered if mixing up those statistics has a bearing? Like say, be murdered by my supermodel in a bathtub? Which the bath demise carries a one in 840,000 chance; so does one lower probability raise the other; or vice versa?  All of that to compare real life issues as becoming a movie star (one in about one and a half million chance no matter how many tap dancing lessons you had as a kid, or how straight the orthodontist got your pearly whites.) 

Or of dying left-handed, (one in four million four hundred thousand), which for me being left-handed,  had me baffled on how in heavens they could ever come up with that sort of ratio? Your tax funding dollars for federal grants at work my friends and neighbors.  My personal suspicion is the ‘researchers’ smoked ganja all year long on Jamaica until the grant deadline was about to run out so they had to regurgitate something really unique and impossible to refute: which ganja just so happens to be Sanskrit for the word cannabis, now only a pseudo intellectual would discover that.  Heck you have one chance in ten million of becoming president; that’s a fraction of how many dollars you’d need to spend to fetch the prize.  That brings me to the big-fat-prize that we all lust after; the mother of all mother lotto’s, the Powerball, in which your chance to win is equivalent to our solar system’s diameter’s in miles as to odds of winning the jackpot; way less than the above or becoming an astronaut (a little over one in twelve million; again I wonder if you were an astronaut ex-supermodel running for president what are your actual odds of hitting your objective would be? Or, maybe you could just write a New York Times bestseller on the effort and relish your good fortune.