by Mark Schiffman, M.S. 

And the winning numbers are…08 27 34 04 19, and the Powerball number is… 10!

Did you win? I didn’t.  I, like millions of others, wasted (at least) $2 deluding myself into thinking that I had a fighting chance to become a billionaire.  Yet, hopefully, nobody actually quit their jobs or put a down payment on a new jet before confirming the win.  One of the important sub-goals that Ellis and Bernard (1986) outline as consonant with REBT values is to have realistic expectations, as “healthy people do not waste time striving for the unattainable or for unrealistic perfection” (DiGiuseppe, Doyle, Druden, and Backx, 2014, p. 15).

However, since this week we honor and celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is important to ask, who is to judge what is considered a realistic expectation?  If Vegas put odds on the success of the Civil Right Movement before it started, would the odds be any better than the 1 in 292,000,000 of the Powerball?  Would a psychologist have advised Dr. King to focus on a more realistic and attainable goal than changing the course of race relations in the United States?

Having realistic expectations does not preclude risk-taking.  In fact, another sub-goal of REBT is a willingness to take risks.  So when do I take risks and when do I have realistic expectations? What’s the cut-off on the statistics? Do I need to call an actuary before making decisions? Balancing risk-taking and realistic expectations can get tricky and sometimes can lead to uncertainty, which actually leads to another sub-goal of REBT – acceptance of uncertainty.

So, it is with no degree of certainty that I encourage us all to take risks while balancing realistic expectations. Have a dream, but have a backup plan.  Buy a lotto ticket, but still invest into your 401K.  Perhaps unintentionally, the New York Lotto really encapsulates this tension between risk-taking, realistic expectations, and uncertainty with its motto: “Hey, you never know…”

Mark Schiffman