If you’ve ever planned something really important in your life, you’ve probably found that things went wrong anyway. Murphy’s Law, sometimes called the law of bad luck, was first articulated by US Air Force Captain Edward A. Murphy Jr.
In 1949, Murphy was an aerospace engineer working on Project MX981 at Edwards Air Force Base — a research program studying how much deceleration force the human body could withstand. During one test, a technician wired a set of accelerometers backwards, and the entire experiment came back with zero data. Furious, Murphy reportedly said: “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”
Years later, writer Arthur Bloch, inspired by the saying, published the now-famous collection “Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!” — a book that has become a kind of survival manual for anyone who has ever managed a project, a deadline, or a crisis. At AdmiGram.com, we thought it was worth rounding up the most useful conclusions that follow from Murphy’s original observation.
20 Laws of Bad Luck That Work Flawlessly
- A true specialist is a person who doesn’t make minor mistakes — they make grandiose ones.
- If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.
- Eight people can do the work of ten — but somehow it still takes twelve to manage them.
- The effectiveness of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of participants and the time spent.
- If something seems easy to do, it’s definitely going to be hard. And if it looks hard, it’s absolutely impossible to accomplish.
- If something works on the first try, something is wrong with it.
- If you think the situation is improving, it just means you don’t know about the next problem yet.
- Of two mutually exclusive unpleasant outcomes, the one that causes the most damage will occur.
- When things are going really well, something is about to go wrong very soon.
- The free parking space is always on the opposite side of the street.
- If you drop something, it will roll into the most inaccessible corner.
- Anything that starts well ends badly. Anything that starts badly ends even worse.
- Any error in any calculation will be the one aimed at causing the greatest damage.
- All deadlines should be multiplied by a factor of two.
- Nothing is ever built on time and within budget.
- What you need is never there — and when you don’t need it, there’s plenty of it.
