Millionaire for a Moment

I attended an exciting conference last week all about Mortgage Planning. The most rewarding moment, however, may have come when I did not receive $1,000,000. On the second night of this three day conference they played one of the many games designed to keep the energy level high. This particular game was based on the TV game show Deal… or No Deal and the player had a chance to win $1,000,000. I was as excited to play as the next guy; that may not be a lot of money, but you can probably live on it!

The first step had all 3900 of us go to side tables where we randomly picked a chocolate bar. Twenty-six of those bars had a golden ticket inside, a la Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I was one of the lucky 26 and we all went on stage. Now they had to narrow us down to one contestant so they handed us each a black envelope as they collected our golden tickets. All but one person would open their envelope to find the word “Sorry” printed on the card inside. But that one person – he or she was going to continue on and play the game. There was a glitch though, as often happens in life, and when they finished handing us our envelopes they realized that they had given out more than 40 chocolate bars with golden tickets! How to fairly deal with the people who did not get an envelope? The host decided to collect all the envelopes from us and divide us into two groups; he flipped a coin and half the group had to leave the stage. The other half were given the envelopes anew and after opening them one person went on to play the game. Yours truly was in the group that had to leave the stage.

Now what I neglected to mention is that I did not know what the envelopes were for when they handed them to us and before the host decided to take them all back I opened mine and glanced inside. You can probably guess by now that mine did not say “Sorry” and I would have been the person playing!! While I sat in my seat watching the game play out (after passing on the chance to take $29,000 and losing the chance at $1,000,000 early on, the lone player walked with a cool $9,000) I at first felt a little frustrated and angry. But I soon realized that I was walking away with much more than a million dollars. After all, even if you win $1,000,000 it begins to lose value instantly due to depreciation, taxes and so on. But I was the only one in the room to leave with a secret message from an envelope. A message of priceless value that can never be taken or stolen or depreciated. A message that was fated to end up in my hands. Inside the envelope, there was a card and it read: You ARE a WINNER!

Filed under: LIFE THAT POPs , Success