How to win from Powerball, even if you lost

A video emerged last week that shows servers and chefs at a restaurant in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, bursting into shrieks of celebration because they thought they had won the January 9 Powerball drawing and its $900 million jackpot. One worker reportedly quit right on the spot.

It turns out, however, that in some rare, taunting twist of fate, they were looking at the wrong day's numbers - their numbers perfectly matched the previous Powerball drawing, which had no winner.

By Wednesday, the Powerball jackpot had ballooned to a historic $1.6 billion and had cast millions of Americans into fantasies about what they would do if they won. And a common "step one" among those visions is exactly what that restaurant worker decided to do: immediately quit working.

Last fall, Julie Leach of Michigan won a $310 million Powerball drawing and said at a news conference that the first thing she did was leave her "nasty, dirty" job. Next on her to-do list was making sure her kids wouldn't have to work, either.

It probably tells us something about our general attitude toward the workplace that so many people have lottery fantasies that begin the same way, the differences lying only in the details of how to walk out the door. Quit in front of the entire staff while telling off the boss? Simply not show up to work the next day?

On Thursday morning, at least three people faced that prospect. At least one lucky winner each in California, Tennessee and Florida had a stake in a ticket with all the winning numbers. They will split that $1.6 billion pot (or $983.5 million if paid all at once), the biggest of all time.

Yet just about everyone who bought a Powerball ticket in the past week lost. Hundreds of thousands of people won't play out their dream scenarios. But the visions don't have to be for nothing.

If you want to get something out of that losing ticket, take a minute to linger over the fantasy you constructed before that drawing crushed it. What does it tell you about the life you wish you were leading? Do you wish that the work you were doing was more meaningful? That you traveled more? That you helped those in need? That you spent more time with your family?

There are plenty of things $1.6 billion can buy, like the ability to never work a night shift again and a ticket to the sun-soaked beaches of a tropical island. And a home on that island. And the island itself. Scattered among those daydreams, though, is some key insight into what we value most dearly, the type of work we might do even if we didn't need the money, and the kind of person we wish we were.

That's a pretty good start for thinking about what may still be in our power to change about our lives even without a winning ticket.