My Daughter’s Secret Trick To Success
She had the mojo…
I remember a spring evening way, way back when my daughter was in high school. After a long day at work I was relaxing in “my chair.” She came into the room and sat on the coffee table in front of the chair, putting herself in the center of my vision.
“Dad, I need you to drive me somewhere on Saturday morning. The local police department is having some workshop thingie on bicycle safety. It’ll be over in the Sears parking lot across town. The thing is, the local bike shop is holding a raffle and they’re giving away a like 300 dollar mountain bike. So I need to go so that I can win that bike.”
I found it interesting how she phrased that. She was nothing but honest with her intentions and supremely confident in attaining her goals. (But when did she start having any interest in bicycling?)
Who was this person?
“You seem pretty confident that you’ll win this raffle.”
She stood up and looked down at me, “Of course I am. I know the secret trick to winning raffles.” With this she walked off to her room.
That Saturday morning my daughter and I arrived at a very crowded Sears parking lot. According to the next day’s edition of the local newspaper, attendance surpassed two hundred. I thought it was more like a hundred fifty but I could have been wrong.
My daughter extricated herself from me to go enter the raffle. She was quickly back at my side as the festivities commenced.
“So Dad, do you think we can fit that mountain bike in the back of the Subaru or are we gonna have to tie it to the roof?”
Way back when I was a kid I occasionally and accidentally displayed bizarre moments of confidence. They were few and far between. But I’m not sure I ever reached the confidence level that my beloved daughter was expressing.
Standing next to each other, we listened to the presentation by the chief of police. He thanked everyone for coming together in a spirit of community then he reiterated the horrific dangers of not following proper and legal biking protocol. (Or something like that.)
And then came the raffle drawing. My daughter elbowed me, “I’m gonna win! I’m gonna win!”
I prayed that she was not setting herself up for serious disappointment.
And then the chief of police announced the winner of the raffle…
… and it was my daughter!
As I looked at her, she stuck her tongue out at me, “Told ya!” She theatrically turned her body around to head off to the chief of police to accept her prize.
How the hell does a father respond to that?
It turned out that the three hundred dollar mountain bike fit into the back of the Subaru after all. It was at a stop sign on the way home that I turned to my daughter sitting in the passenger seat next to me, “Okay, you simply must tell me your secret to winning that raffle.”
She suddenly started clapping her hands and bouncing up and down in her seat like a little girl. With a huge smile on her face, she turned to me and asked, “You really want to know?”
“Of course I want to know!”
“Okay. You go up to the little table to enter the raffle. There are a thousand slips of paper and a pen sitting on the table. Everyone writes their name on a slip of paper and then sticks it in a big jar or tub with all the other slips of entries.”
I was listening.
“So what do I do differently?” she continued. “Before putting my slip of paper into the big pot…”
“Yeah? Yeah?”
“I fold it in half.”
“What?”
“I fold my slip of paper in half!”
“What?”
“Imagine you’re a hand and you’re digging deep into a big jar of slips of paper in order to pick a winner. All those slips of paper feel exactly the same… but then suddenly the hand comes across a slip of paper that feels DIFFERENTLY. Why? Because it is folded in half. The hand automatically picks it simply because it is different!”
Seriously?
“I told you I would win and I did. How serious is that?”
Who was this person?
Three weeks later the three hundred dollar mountain bike that my daughter won was stolen off the back porch of our home.
I asked her, “Didn’t you lock it up?”
She shrugged her shoulders, “Nah, I couldn’t be bothered.”
“What? It was a three hundred dollar mountain bike.”
“Yeah, well you know what I learned from having that bike?”
“No, what?”
“That I’m really not into biking.”
I was speechless.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, “I hope who ever stole that bike is into biking.”
DISCLAIMER: In the many subsequent years since that incident with my daughter I have actually tried her method for winning raffles maybe four or five or six times. AND NOT ONCE DID I WIN A SINGLE THING!
I learned that it is not just about the folding of paper…
… It’s about the mojo!
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Another story involving my beloved daughter…