Murphy's Law

I was thinking today - Is Murphy's Law just a subset of the Law of Attraction? For those who don't know what Murphy's Law is: it's the universal law which states that if something can go wrong, it will. For example, if you schedule a special occasion for a certain date, when the date comes, something happens in your life that prevents you from attending the occasion. Another example, if you only take $20 with you to the grocery store, you will realize that you need more at cash-out time. You get the idea I hope. Basically, if you plan for one thing, you will get another, often times the opposite of what you planned.

In my most recent engineering project we had to design a couple of quick digital boards. We always like to order spare boards for future build if needed. Well, we did not buy spare boards for one particular design. Several of us wanted to, but senior management decided that the risk was too small, so no spares were ordered. What happened yesterday? The one board out of the whole system that did not have spares is the one that failed. Now we have to order new boards from scratch, which will cost us 3 times as much as it would have if we had just bought spare boards. We also have to wait for another week before we can plug in the new board. We lost time and money. This is Murphy's Law in all its power.


But, I thought to myself, this is simply the Law of Attraction in full force. We all thought of this board and the fact that we did not order spare boards. As a result, deep in our minds, we thought "this better not fail". But since the LOA does not recognize negative words, it understood "this better fail", and it did fail. The LOA worked in this case. Just us fearing the failure, caused it to manifest itself. I tried to change this last minute by shifting my thinking process, but it was too late. I wonder if I can still get the board to auto-fix itself? I may try to do this to see if I can use the LOA to fix the bad board. I will keep you guys updated if I do.