A Monday Morning Memo from The Wizard of Ads
I decided to become a coin collector during the summer of the second grade and my decision became official when I put it in a letter to my grandmother. When my father came home that night, I asked if I could search through his pocket change for interesting coins, “because I’m a coin collector.”
Dad had only one coin which was even a little bit unusual. It was a1955 penny, only ten years old, but it had two additional fives plainly stamped into the date. I took the penny and searched for a special place to put it. For some reason I’ll never understand, I decided to pull up the air conditioner vent from the floor of my bedroom at 404 Grandview Boulevard where I tucked the penny under the revealed edge of the carpet. I then replaced the air conditioner vent into its hole and completely forgot about coin collecting until two weeks later, when I received a book about coin values as a gift from my grandmother. On page one was a huge photo of my penny.
The publishers of the coin guide were offering a hundred dollars for pennies like mine. They called it a 1955 double die. Coin books today say my penny will bring from five hundred to two thousand dollars and that it’s the third most rare penny in US history. But I forgot where I put it. I didn’t remember pulling up the air conditioner vent and tucking the penny under the carpet until seventeen years later. I knocked on the door at 404 Grandview Boulevard only to learn that the carpet had been changed four years earlier. No penny.
Am I the luckiest person in the world for finding that penny on my very first day of coin collecting, or am I the unluckiest person in the world for losing it?
I choose to believe I’m lucky. I consider myself so lucky, in fact, that I never buy lottery tickets because I don’t feel it would be fair to all the people who don’t have my amazing luck. Do you have this kind of luck? You can if you’d like.
An ancient scholar wrote, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” and I completely agree. We are the sum total of our thoughts. If you are what you think, why not think yourself lucky? It’s easy to do! Just take a moment to look around and notice all the good things in your life and be glad for them.
You are lucky. Very lucky. Good things happen to you for no reason at all! You are amazingly, unbelievably, mind-bendingly lucky.
Don’t ever forget it.
Roy H. Williams
