An Example of "Dumb Luck"
This is a little story of a high school student who had very poor grades.
He wasn’t “stupid” per se, he just didn’t have any interest in most of the subjects. Anyway, when it came time to apply to college, while all the other kids sent their applications in the first day it was possible to do so, he didn’t bother. Months later, long after everyone else had applied to college and had been accepted and had received their scholarships, he was persuaded by peer and parental pressure to submit an application to the local state university. He sent it in a week after the the deadline, almost on purpose. He was going through the motions. Given his gruesome grades and woeful attendance record, he assumed that he had no chance of being accepted to college, much less of getting any scholarship money (and he had no money for tuition, so the whole exercise seemed doubly pointless).
Well guess what. That year, because the admission committee had been so picky (and because many of the kids they had accepted had decided to go elsewhere at the last minute), they suddenly found themselves way short of filling all the available slots. Large universities have big football stadiums, and they were desperate to fill the empty spaces at the last minute. So when this guy’s pathetic application arrived on their barren desk, even though it was late and he had gruesome grades, the university accepted him immediately.
That was not the end of it. It turns out that the scholarship committee had been very parsimonious (that means cheap) that year in handing out money to all the eager beaver on-time applicants, so they had a bunch of dough left over. As you know, if a bureaucrat doesn’t spend all of his or her total annual allotment, they get less money next year. So they handed this guy a full scholarship. Tuition, room, board, everything.
If this fellow had followed procedure, and had applied on time like everyone else, none of this would have happened.
You hear stories like this all the time. It’s not “dumb luck.” It’s the power of the Principles of Applied Stupidity.
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© 2008, Justin Locke. This material may not be reproduced or re-transmitted without permission from the author.