lucky little black book

lucky little black book

by: the ADHD Accountant - Krid

‘It was a dark and stormy night’ certainly sounds like a dramatic way for me to start my story. My quasi-biographical how-it-happened-to-me tale of overnight fortune. The truth is that it wasn’t a dark and stormy night at all; it was the cumulation of almost 20 years of on and off again sardonic amusement against the gods of speculation. A clever phrase I’ve ripped off of Emily D. Baker, by the way. Though I couldn’t say if she was the first to use it. She mentioned someone named Saltsy?

Thinking of that saying now I’m reminded of the verse… I just spent two hours on Google trying to find the songs that I can hear in my head: “I’m so clever! Oh, so clever! So very clever am I!” Can’t find it. But I’m sure I can hear the tune clearly. Sometimes I get a little sidetracked. Depending on how stubborn I’m feeling – a lot sidetracked. (edit: 2 days later I recalled it is “I’m So Pretty” from West Side Story and I just swapped words)

Where was I? Yes, I was going to tell you about my not-so-overnight success. All thanks to a lucky little black book. About 20 years ago, before all the cell phones and personal computers, and long before I knew about MS Excel, I had a thought. A profound thought. It felt like an insight into the very working of the world; about permutations, probabilities, and possibilities.

What are the numbers chosen the least? That’s right – I had discovered a system to pick WINNING lottery tickets! A big proponent of stationery and writing, thought mostly for notes, I decided to start a brand project notebook. A black Moleskine notebook. Technically it is called a large squared notebook in that parlance. Hardcover and roughly 8”x5.5” with nice grid lines, a attached bookmark ribbon, and an elastic to hold it shut, these books were my preferred notebooks for school. Hard to destroy, grid lines for all kinds of notes and doodling (or, playing ‘squares’), and they fit in a binder with the rings and didn’t stick out.

On the first page, not the inside of the cover because I never write on the left side, I wrote my name and address and promised a reward if it was returned. Conveniently Moleskine knows what I like and they have conveniently designed MY notebook to have all these features that like, and has prepared spaces for this. And right below that, on the bottom half of the page, I wrote out “MY LUCKY LITTLE BLACK BOOK!” With the quotation mark. I must have written over the exclamation mark several times because it is thick and dark compared to the rest of the writing. I fondly recall emphatically thinking that this would be my ticket to wealth, and the happiness that it would bring.

With that I was ready to start. The system? On the second page, the first grid marked page, I wrote down the numbers from 1 to 25 in black pen double spaced, followed by a dash. If I haven’t mentioned it before, using multiple colours is essential to good notes. In the middle, starting at the top, I continued the sequence, 26 to 49. While not big enough to let me do the whole sequence I knew it wouldn’t take me long to win. I wouldn’t need that much space. As a side note, another good thing about grid paper is that it is very easy to write straight down even in the middle of the page. I do appreciate symmetry.

Starting on page three I would, over the years, write the date and the winning lottery numbers out. Back then I got them from the newspaper. Google it. I use a nice date format ‘yyyy mm d’ which keeps things easy to read, and roughly the same size. An example from my notebook is: “2000 03 25 – 10, 30, 31, 35, 43, 44, b46.” The b stands for ‘Bonus;’ a largely unnecessary notation that appealed to me. Each day I tried to use different colours and the ‘b’ was always in black. I confess it made it seem like a wobbly black line going down the page if you connected all the black b’s together. You could fit 3 columns in a page but I stuck to two. With 240 pages I had lots of room. Not that I would need it. I was going to be rich in a few short weeks. Months, at most. On the first page I would use a simple tally system to mark every time a number was drawn. Simple!

How would this work? What was so clever about me and my idea? The difference between probability and the odds. You need to match 6 numbers to win. The odds of you drawing 6 for 6 is 1:13,983,816. The probability of a given number being drawn is (or, rather was to my young, naïve, and not particularly fond of math mind) heavily influenced by it’s frequency of being drawn. I knew that, over time, each number, if truly random, should occur as frequently. Therefor, the numbers drawn to date the least frequently were the most likely to be drawn.

If you know more about math and statistics than I did, or you are slightly less high on a heady combination of hope and youthful folly you may have taken less time than I did to get the expected results. A lot of losing. I never went crazy, a ticket a week usually when filling up with gas. I didn’t blow wads of money. I didn’t get upset when I realized that I wasn’t Einstein clever. But, I also didn’t stop.

My little notebook is pretty ratty now. And, it has some smeared pages, Some tears, and a bit of water damage. Possibly tea. It has been through some things; so have I. More importantly It amuses me and reminds me of my own hubris. It is familiar, and routine. Which is it’s own comfort some days. A big proponent of MS Excel I started several times to work on a new tool, looking for new ‘secret’ relationships between numbers. An interesting point of fact is that they publish, for free, the winning numbers since DAY ONE! That’s fight, in one file, 127 pages, you can get nearly 40 years of data. But, it never beat out my lucky little black book for being part of my week. Part of my life. Though newspapers changed to websites and rollerballs changed to fountain pens it remained.

At 10 minutes a week keeping track, tallying, and filling out the lottery card, over roughly 50 weeks a year, for 20 years I reckon that (thank you Excel for calculating) I have made over $120/hr. (not net of costs). That’s right, though I am sure you have guessed it already – I won!!!

Only $20,000, actually the prize was $25,000 but I have a deal with my mom and sister that they each get 10%, so my ‘portion’ is merely $20,000. And, even more ironically (is it really irony), the prize wasn’t based off of the regularly lottery game where I used my system to choose the numbers. I won the guaranteed prize draw instead. Complete random chance. And, I bought the ticket on a clear winter afternoon with blue skies and my breath frozen before me. Not dark. Not stormy. And, not night. Which is possibly redundant, and most certainly evocative. Yes, I did that on purpose.

I think, for now, there end-ith the tale. I fear I have misled you a little my loyal reader; the fortune is a small one. Many may not even choose to use the word fortune for it at all given my annual salary, my investment portfolio, potential inheritance, et cetera. To be honest, I have enough that this ‘fortune’ is merely an amusing anecdote about some of the failure I have experienced along the successes of my life. But, perhaps, it is also a testament to unexpected success in the face of persistence?

There is another lottery drawing tomorrow, lets try again. Bon chance!

<< END SONG: Alanis Morrisette – Ironic >>