Via this story:
For all his multimillion-dollar lottery winnings, Jack Whittaker can’t seem to do anything but lose.
The man who landed a $315 million jackpot on Christmas Day seven years ago has since lost his wife to divorce, his granddaughter to drugs and now his daughter, found dead in her West Virginia home on July 5, according to the Charleston Daily Mail.
Whittaker has also been arrested on charges of driving drunk, lost more than $500,000 in cash to thieves and settled with the parents of a teenage friend of his granddaughter’s who died at his house from a drug overdose.
A surprising number of other lottery winners share his pain.
Money amplifies the type of person you already are, nothing more nothing less. And it enables you to go down the path you were on even faster. If you have always been a nasty person, money will enable you to be even more nasty to everyone since now you won’t have much social incentive to hold you in line.
If you are a wasteful person, getting a lot of money will enable you to waste a lot of it. If you have no goals in life, fool around with drugs, etc, money will just enable you to do so much more of that.
If you are a giver, you will now give charities even more money if you strike rich. If you are an investor, you’ll invest even more of it. If you are an entreprenuerr you will try and create even more stuff. Money is just a metric like velocity and volume, not a test of talent or character.
yep, I agree with that. Money doesn’t necessary solve your problems. In many cases it only aggrevates it.
Here’s an article in the same vein. About why many succesful athletes tend to go broke after retirement in similar ways to lottery winners:
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1153364/index/index.htm
nice link, indeed!