Be Careful Who You Tell After Winning the Lottery
After winning the lottery, it is perfectly natural to want to tell everybody within shouting distance. However, you must proceed with extreme caution. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there with questionable motives. Often, these are strangers, but sometimes they can be people you know and even trust.
Although it will probably be killing you inside, you will be doing yourself a huge favor by containing this incredible news. For one thing, the people around you are likely to get almost as (and sometimes even more) excited as you did when you found out. Their excitement is likely to refuel your excitement, and that is not what you need right now. In fact, you’ll be amazed how quickly you will come to terms with everything if you just allow yourself to concentrate on remaining calm. There is no doubt you will feel completely different a week after winning the lottery as you did the day after winning. Take some time to ground yourself before turning everybody else’s world upside-down.
Keep in mind that any friends or family you tell about winning the lottery are likely to mimic your emotions from their own perspectives. So while you’re getting all excited thinking about who to tell, how to spend the money, and how your life is about to change, these people are likely to be relating the same concerns to their own lives.
Simply put, it is best to keep tight-lipped because everybody is naturally self-interested (including the well-meaning people you love). This does not mean they are bad people or that they don’t care about you; it’s just that human beings are mentally wired to lookout for themselves. And running away from financial disaster isn’t really that much different than running away from an escaped zoo animal.
Although kind-hearted people often find it difficult to accept the nature of self-interest, winning the lottery certainly tends to speed up the process. And the more quickly recent winners are able to come to terms with this reality, the easier it becomes to avoid common mistakes after winning the lottery.
Unfortunately, if you go around telling people you won the lottery, most of them will only focus on being happy for you for a short time before trying to figure out how your good fortune could benefit them. And right now, you certainly don’t need anybody filling your head with their own ideas of what you ought to buy with money you don’t even have yet. Of course, once you finally cash in that winning lotto ticket, you will almost certainly need to learn how to say “no” when faced with this kind of pressure.
