357. Gamble: Be inspired by a casino or lottery ticket.
My first trip to Las Vegas was New Years after I turned 21. As a college senior, I was auditing a graduate level statistics class in preparation for grad school and we had just finished our unit on probability. This knowledge is not what you want when going to Vegas for the first time because all I could see was how no one could possibly win. The strip in 1985 was very different than it is now with the hotels being the Flamingo, Frontier, Circus Circus, and The Stardust. The Dick Clark Rocking Eve telecast was this mob of people spilling into the streets with little organization. Wham’s “Last Christmas” had just been released so it was the soundtrack for the whole trip, played everywhere on repeat. It was magical.
