How to get rid of bad luck

You know, sometimes the title misleads people into believing that it is descriptive of the content. For instance, did you know that "Spirits Having Flown" by the Bee Gees does not have the word "spirits" in the song at all?

Maybe that's artistic, or maybe that's bullshit.

But I can assure you what I'm going to write next is the latter - so you have been warned.

How to get rid of bad luck.. you can't. You will just have to sit and wait for it to go away. Let me illustrate this with a real-life example: me.

To say I've had a bad week would be funny. It wasn't just bad, it was so bad beyond bad that it had to be bad luck. If your week sucked, some self-reflection might have put the fault with yourself. But if your week REALLY sucked, then you can attribute it to bad luck.

I don't know where to start, but these are the things that happened last week:

I shortlisted 4 stocks and chose to buy one. The other three went up while the one I bought plummeted five cents. Maybe that's my fault.

I was fired by Roman Abramovich aka some smart boy's mother. The smart boy happened to be my student. All right, maybe that was my fault too.

My unit trusts suffered losses. Maybe that's my fault - since I could have chosen not to buy them and let my money accumulate 0.1% interest in the bank. Or was it 0.01%? Can't remember, but you get the drift.

The Euros which I was holding went down as well.

And I have a total of thirty-one new mosquito bites as of last week. This is NOT a joke. So maybe this is also my fault, since I could have slept in FBO (full battle order) and gloves.

And I was half an hour late for lectures because of massive jams that were previously unbeknown to me. Okay so MAYBE that was ALSO my fault because I could have left the house half an hour earlier.

Putting all these situations together, my fault factor is so high that it becomes clear to any ordinary bystander that there must be some other factor involved. No one can be that much at fault. Contrary to popular belief, faults are like mathematics, it can be undefined at times. I'll leave that for another day.

Simply put, it just had to be bad luck. Christians would claim something along the lines that I was being tested - I guess that works as well.

ANYWAY.

Saturday rolled along, and Saturday means Premiership night.

I have a habit of betting on draw matches, as does YL. We have been playing it for a while. I told him that with my abysmal luck, there was no way I was going to win any bets this weekend.

And by extension, since my luck was abysmal, if I wasn't going to bet, the result would turn out exactly to be a draw. (hence making me pissed off that I didn't bet)

YL was going to place the bet. I told him that I would cause him to lose if I did, so I decided to save my money and his.

Later that night, Wigan 1-1 Fulham

Exactly as envisioned.

Moral of the story? If you have bad luck, recognise it and admit you can't do anything about it. It's a bit (actually a lot) like serving National Service really, and they even have a term for it - "suck thumb". Once you've accepted your fate, things become much easier.

Life is a zero sum game. For every loser there is a winner. While you are condemned to being a loser, make sure one of your friends is the one benefitting from it. Although I might sound like I'm trying to claim credit, I believe that I helped YL win his bet this weekend.

Even if I didn't, the idea still remains.

If you know someone is always wrong and makes all the wrong decisions - it automatically follows that going a different path from him would make for a better choice. (assuming two choices)

So even though you can't get rid of bad luck, you can channel good luck elsewhere. Just don't channel it to Singapore Pools, they're the major propagator of bad luck.