I often send my staff memos with advice that does not actually relate to anything to do with work, and in a recent one, I gave them advice on what to do with bonus money paid at the end of the year. So many people in this day and age go out and treat themselves straightaway, or use the money to upgrade some aspect of their life instead of focusing on the important things. The important things are settling debt and providing for one’s retirement, not to mention the ups and downs of life. 

The comparison that I gave my staff is that bookmakers find it a profitable business to take bets on sports because most sports, and certainly the most popular ones are popular because things don’t always go as expected – and that is exactly like life. I have written about golf in that way previously, because golf is very much like life. You can hit a fantastic shot but it bounces on something hard and takes a tremendously bad bounce and you are in terrible trouble. Sometimes a whole combination of things lead to the team that cannot lose, playing against somebody who has never beaten them before, losing and one would think of the Springboks and Japan in that regard. 

At other times, it really gets down to the bounce of the ball, and a rugby ball is no doubt shaped deliberately as it is, to bring the element of chance into a game. The reality of life is that it is not that different to many of the sports events we watch. Sometimes it goes as expected but on many occasions it does not and during the course of the event, or one’s life, there are ups and downs and good luck and bad luck. You have to ride the good luck, you have to capitalise on it, and you also have to prepare for the bad luck. You have to put money aside and keep money in a rainy day fund, or whatever you call it, so that if somebody does go wrong you don’t have to explain to everybody else how you have been tremendously unlucky and something completely unexpected has happened and that is why you never planned for it or had any money set aside. The point is you should expect the unexpected, because it does always happen to one, and unfortunately on more than a few occasions during your lifetime. The unexpected is not unexpected.