Story of William Post iii, the unlucky lottery winner - MQS

Today our motivational quote is dedicated to William Post iii –

“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” – Harry Golden

Sofer, I have covered motivational stories of various personalities who fought with the hard times and finally became successful in their life. But today I will tell you a different kind of story which will prove that in terms of making it big we cannot depend on luck entirely. Hard work and perseverance are the main keys to success. Of course, luck will play a crucial factor for many cases; but luck without hard work will eventually lead to failure. A similar kind of incident happened with William Post iii. Today William's story will be our focus of discussion.

The backstory of William Post - 

William Post iii was born on 5th April 1939 in Pennsylvania USA. Early in his life, he lost his mother, because of which he had to spend most of his childhood in an orphanage. In his entire youth, he tried several occupations such as Cook, Track driver, etc. but did not find any satisfaction in them. Also, these jobs were not giving him enough earnings to spend a decent life.

Story of Lottery winning -

Being depressed with his life, William thought that there is only one way to change his life was to win a big lottery. So he sold his ring to his landlady and bought 40 lottery tickets. This time luck favored his decision and he won a whopping $16.2 million.

Once he won such a huge amount of money, William thought that now he can do all the things he deemed all his life. To leave a peaceful life he bought a huge mansion purchased a wine license, a beautiful restaurant; even bought an airplane. But very soon William ran out of his luck, all of a sudden he found out that his brother planned to eliminate him to inherit all of his wealth. Also, his landlady took William took him to the court stating that William promised her a share of his winning. William lost this case in the court and as per the judgment had to pay one-third of his winning. But, William denied paying anything to the lady, so the court again decided to freeze all of his winnings. He soon sold all of his assets and filed for bankruptcy. 

This was not the end of William's misfortune, apart from losing all of his money, William had to go to jail as it was found that he fired gunshots towards one of his lenders. After some time, William got released from jail and again started his life from the scratch. William died in the year 2006.

Conclusion - 

Only if William could have planned it better, he would not have suffered so much at the end of the days. In his case luck gave him a huge favor but without any experience and proper planning, he was not able to capitalize on it. Once he won such a huge amount instead of buying unnecessary luxurious things if he could have found out ways to invest some portion of it he could have lived the life he dreamed all of his life. We all need to learn from the mistake done by William and should not always depend on luck, because “The Hard Work Puts you Where The Good Luck can find You.”