Question: What Would You Do After Winning a Ginormous Lottery?

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Cha-ching! Imagine you just won $10 million in the lottery. After you finished celebrating your potentially life-changing win, would you hit the sheets so you could be well-rested for work the next day or would you quickly fire off an “I quit” email to your boss and continue your celebration?

Roughly 80 percent of Americans would keep working after a big lottery win, according to a new worker survey from cloud computing company Adobe Systems. Just over half (51 percent) of survey respondents said they would stay in the same job.

Previous surveys by Gallup and CareerBuilder revealed similar results: Many Americans would keep working even after a big lottery win.

But would they really? It’s easy to say you’d keep toiling away at work if you won the lottery, but after you collected a multimillion-dollar paycheck, would you take back your previous assertions so you could travel or relax or whatever it is lottery winners do?

According to research on lotto winners, it’s more than lip service. Most winners do go back to work, regardless of how fat their bank accounts are.

“We all need something outside of ourselves to stay focused on,” Denver-based career coach Leila Hock told MarketWatch.

A 2004 study published in the Journal of Psychology found that 85.5 percent of lotto winners actually do continue working. The study revealed that individuals who perceive working — or their particular job — as important are more likely to keep punching the clock.

“Individuals with psychologically and financially rewarding jobs continued working regardless of the amount they won, while people who worked in low-paying semi-skilled and unskilled jobs were far more likely to quit the labor force,” writes H. Roy Kaplan, the author of a study on nearly 600 lottery winners published in the Journal of Gambling Behavior.

Of course, some lottery winners are more than happy to kiss their workplace goodbye.

Northern California resident Steve Tran won half of a $648 million jackpot in December 2014, the Los Angeles Times reports. After he found out he won, Tran left this message for his boss: “I’m really sorry, boss. I hit the jackpot. I don’t think I’m going to come in today, tomorrow or ever.”

What would you do if you won the lottery? Would you continue working? Share your comments below or on our Facebook page.

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