Miles To Go.

"Play responsibly"

I’ve been trading everyday phone calls and emails with the developer that built our new family home. The experience hasn’t been perfect, from my perspective, but I acknowledge the guy probably has plenty other things going on besides the faulty control panel on my Kohler steambath.

Turns out, I was right.

Seems Brandon won the Connecticut Powerball lottery earlier this month, and it all came out today. For those that don’t know it, our new nhometown of Greenwich does not see a lot of suffering. In fact, if there was ever a town that did not need a lottery winner, that would be ours. If there is an Occupy Greenwich Avenue movement starting soon to decry the inequality of the 1% winning a lottery designed for the 99%, consider this: the town is full of rags to riches stories. It’s just that they usually involve numbers that come through a Bloomberg terminal, not spit out for a dollar at the local BP station. Luck is random, and this proves it, again.

But the BP station is where Brandon and his two boyhood buddies went in equal (I surmise) on a dollar bet that pulled a lump sum of $100,000,000. (Powerball markets it as $254,000,000 but that’s a 30 year payout into a black hole of tax policy no one in or out of Greenwich should take a bet on). I was recently told by an EO leadership swami that you can’t control the world, you can only control how you react to it. This is a good example of that.

He has been sitting on this news for the past three weeks. In the meantime, he has been responsive and professional about the various punchlist fixes he owes at the house. We knock something out every few days. And that says a lot about Brandon; old school, honest and possessing a genuinely good heart. I spend a lot of time thinking about Trust, and have written about the Heuristics of Trust , actually more than once. I’m not sure who bought the ticket, but the fact the three shared it also says a lot about their Huck-Finn like trust dynamic ($.66 would have bought out the others a few weeks back).

Today, they came clean and told the public. They had formed a trust, and will give a large amount to charity. They don’t strike me as the type of guys about to go on a race to the bottom and be deeply in debt 5 years after winning. It will probably not change their lives all that much, but that’s an outside view at this point. All I can say is, it has not changed my friend in the past three weeks.

That is a good story. Good on you mate.