The Gambler by Sario Reale

Today I’m going to use an illustration of something I don’t agree with to encourage you to do something similar. Got that?

I was maybe 17, when my friend Clyde and I went to a fair. There was a booth where you could throw baseballs and win junk if you knocked over enough bottles. The fellow who worked there even showed us how to do it.

It was dead easy.

So easy in fact that I lost almost all my skimpy stash of money and Clyde lost even more. I was sick and Clyde was mad. And the guy with the easy-to-knock-over-bottles was probably grinning as he pocketed the money of another sucker. Supposedly there is one born every minute and that night the lucky promoter found two.

Have you wondered why people toss away cash trying to get rich gambling? Simple stupidity? Maybe. There’s got to be a strong element of that. When you figure the odds of winning you’d have to have had a frontal lobotomy of the brain before you’d gamble. Continue reading →