We Live in a Lottery-Based Mental Economy

Your brain is buying lottery tickets all day long.

Every scroll. Every notification. Every viral story about the 19-year-old dropout who built a billion-dollar company.

You're being rewired to accept outliers as realistic opportunities.

Why jump your bike off your house when you can do seven backflips while doing it? Why build a normal business when you could be the next Zuckerberg?

The internet is optimized for extremes. And your brain is hardwired to remember them.

We see these stories and think, "That could be me." It's part of human nature. It's what enables us to strive, to create, to attempt the impossible.

But there's a cost.

When you're constantly exposed to outliers—in sport, business, finance, AI-generated impossibilities—your brain starts to believe the lottery is normal.

It's not.

Benjamin Franklin said compound interest is one of the miracles of the world. So too is compound attention.

If you index on lottery thinking, you will do severe damage to yourself in the long term. You'll chase the next edge case. The next viral moment. The next shortcut that promises everything.

Meanwhile, the things that actually compound—your health, your relationships, your skills, your energy—get neglected.

The lottery is crack for your brain. It's coming through your eyeballs, across your screens, straight into your decision-making.

Even the tools we use every day are built for it. Record every conversation. Never miss a thing. Capture everything.

But amazing ideas don't come from recording everything. They come from being present. From walking the beach looking for shells, not filming yourself looking for shells.

Amazing ideas aren't obvious. They surface when you're asking the right questions, not when you're remembering all the answers.

Unless you create habits. Unless you intentionally create pathways to do things that compound over time.

So how do you fight back?

You stop spending your attention on lottery tickets. You start spending it on things that compound.

1. Get Offline

Americans spend eight hours a day on screens. Everyone you work with is distracted. Undistracted attention is the competitive advantage now.

2. Physical Movement

Your body is wired for movement. Your environment is doing everything it can to get you to sit still and consume. You have to fight that entropy. Move to tip the scales in your favor.

3. Write Every Day

Getting an English degree seemed like the least common sense thing to do when everyone else I knew was majoring in business. But being a better writer made me better at everything else.

I became successful on the internet, not because I was an engineer or because I invented anything. Being a better writer + the internet meant my content reached a bigger audience.

4. Learn With Your Hands

My favorite pandemic project was building massive waterfall steps off my deck. Hard. Expensive. Complicated. But it activated parts of my brain I hadn't used in years. DIY is at-risk in the gig economy.

5. Protect Your Attention

You have to treat yourself like a 12-year-old kid addicted to technology. Because you are. We all are. Delete what tracks you. Turn off what interrupts you. Reclaim your hours.

6. Build Financial Margin

Time is money. But money makes money. And the money you have is probably distributed like your lottery brain—poorly. Benjamin Franklin knew this. Save more than you spend. Create runway. Margin compounds into freedom.

7. Invest in People (on Purpose)

The relationships you build compound. Treat people well—loyalty, trust, and momentum follow. Treat them poorly—churn, resentment, and sabotage follow. Culture compounds faster than tactics.

8. Rest is Infrastructure

Everyone indexes on work and activity. But it's the rest where growth happens. If you're going to use technology, use it to optimize sleep, recovery, and nutrition. Not to track more work.

9. Ask Better Questions

Before you leave a meeting with to-do items, ask: What actually has to be done here? How can we do it faster? Better questions lead to better outcomes. Not longer lists. Not more ideas. Questions lead to results.

10. Do Analog Things

Get a dog. Have a family. Take vacations. Get a hobby. The internet optimizes for scale. Analog things optimize for meaning. Meaning compounds in ways metrics never will.

Write down everything you did last week. Put each activity into two columns: Lottery or Compound.

Lottery depends on luck, virality, timing, or someone else saying yes. Compound depends on you showing up consistently over time.

Look at the ratio.

If 80% of your time is in the lottery column, you're not investing in your future. You're gambling it away.