Is everyone here? I hope you all survived Friday the 13th. Yesterday was our third Friday the 13th of the year, which is the greatest number of times it can happen in one year. The next year with three Friday the 13ths is 2012, a year which now has yet another reason for people to fear it.

On Friday, February 13th, 2009, I wrote about why Friday the 13th is considered bad luck. There were many possible reasons, none of which sounded very convincing. But it shows that people can be afraid of something without having any idea why.

Now it’s time to talk about another superstition: that breaking a mirror gives you seven years of bad luck. I’m sure there are hundreds of millions of people who believe this. What’s interesting about this one is that not only is the superstition baseless, but what we’ve heard isn’t even the right superstition.

I had always heard that if you break a mirror, you get seven years of bad luck, simple as that. But I later learned that this wasn’t the original superstition. I’ve heard different variations, but I’ll tell you the one that sounds right to me.

The idea is that your reflection contains part of your soul. If you break a mirror while your reflection is in it, that part of your soul dies. But you get a new soul every seven years. So until the end of your current soul’s seven year lifetime, whether that happens in one year or five or whatever, you’ll be walking around with a damaged soul, and you’ll have bad luck.

This means that even if you believe the superstition, breaking a mirror is completely harmless if your reflection isn’t in it at the time. Granted, it usually will be, but it’s good news if you were holding the mirror away from you when you dropped it.

More importantly, you won’t get seven years of bad luck. It’s only until your age reaches the next multiple of seven, when you get a new soul. That’s three and a half years of bad luck on average.

There’s some bad news though. If a mirror breaks while your reflection is in it, you’ll get bad luck even if you weren’t the one who broke it.

Nobody believes in the original version of this superstition, though. At the age of 34 (one year before a new soul), someone will drop a mirror with a sheet draped over it (no reflection), and convince themselves that they’re getting seven years of bad luck.

But also, they’ll be standing in front of a mirror while someone else breaks it, and have no concern at all for themselves, not being aware that it doesn’t matter who breaks the mirror. If they don’t believe in that part, then they don’t have to believe in the other part.

How many people create a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad luck for themselves, because they believe in a superstition that never was?

Do any irrational fears hold you back? It’s one thing to be afraid of heights or spiders. They call them “irrational” fears, but they still make sense.

But when you go out of your way to invent a fear, that’s truly irrational. Case in point, paraskavedekatriaphobia, or fear of Friday the 13th. This is a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13.

Fear of Friday the 13th is a phobia of pure choice. Studies have shown that about 10% of Americans are afraid of it, but they have no idea why.

No one can really say where this fear comes from, but most people say it’s a combination of the fear of Friday and the fear of 13. Really, have you ever heard of the fear of Friday? When you go to work on Friday, are you terrified of all the bad things that will happen, or are you looking forward to the weekend?

Anyway, many reasons for this fear have been suggested:

- The number 12 is sometimes considered the number of completeness (12 months of the year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 hours of the clock, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 Apostles of Jesus, 12 gods of Olympus, etc). Adding one more to make it 13 breaks this completeness.

- There were 13 people at the Last Supper, and Judas was the 13th person to arrive.

- Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

- Some people say that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit on a Friday, and that the Great Flood began on a Friday.

- There is a superstition, possibly derived from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having 13 people seated at a table will result in the death of one of them.

- Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since The Canterbury Tales were written in the 14th century.

- Many professions have regarded Friday as an unlucky day to undertake journeys or begin new projects.

- Black Friday has been associated with stock market crashes and other disasters since the 1800s.

- The goddess Frigga (for whom Friday is named) was banished by the Christians and labeled a witch. Every Friday, she was believed to meet with 11 other witches plus the devil, for a total of 13.

- King Philip secretly ordered the mass arrest of all the Knights Templar in France on Friday, October 13, 1307. This story is told in The Da Vinci Code, but some people think this connection wasn’t made until the 20th century.

- In 1907, Thomas W. Lawson published his popular novel Friday, the Thirteenth, in which a stockbroker takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on Friday the 13th. References to Friday the 13th were almost nonexistent before 1907.

- In the Roman calendar, Friday was devoted to Venus. In the Norse calendar, Friday was named after Frigga or Freya. The Christians didn’t like strong women, so they vilified Friday.

- There are 13 months in the pagan lunar calendar.

- Friday was Hangman’s Day in Britain.

- Apollo 13 was launched at 13:13 CST, and its oxygen tank ruptured on April 13, 1970.

None of these sound like really good reasons, do they? A 2000 superstition survey found this:

“…while only 13 percent of the population at large believes that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day, 30 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds think so. Interestingly, the nine installments of the horror movie series Friday the 13th were released during this set’s formative years (1980-1993). Coincidence? Perhaps.”

This is an entirely made up fear, but it affects many people. Some people avoid their normal routines on this day, to the tune of an estimated $800 to $900 million in lost business in the U.S.

It becomes a self-fulling prophesy. If you expect Friday the 13th to be unlucky, you’ll find evidence to support that. I’m sure some bad things happened on Friday the 13th, but are they really that much more significant than September 11th, Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Lincoln’s Assassination, etc?

How about this: decide that from now on, Friday the 13th is good luck. Just see what happens today. (You’ll get another chance next month.)

Photo by Editor B

It’s supposed to cost 59 cents to mail a 6″ x 9″ envelope between 1 and 2 ounces. But every once in a while, one comes back to me for 20 cents of additional postage. So I take it to the post office and ask them to check it, and they weigh it, and they make sure it fits through this slot, and they check with their supervisor, and they can’t understand why it came back to me.

Every time this happened, I got annoyed that I had to waste time getting them to fix their mistake. Until one day, a different person was working there, and she said it’s an extra 20 cents because it doesn’t bend. I wasn’t unlucky the few times it came back, I was lucky all the times it didn’t.

1. Sometimes bad luck is good luck in disguise.

2. Is it any wonder that we debate the Akashic records when modern science is incapable of calculating postage?

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For an interesting read, try Chris Brogan’s new free ebook Personal Branding for the Business Professional. It’s 15 pages and contains “everything from strategy advice to some considerations to over 100 tactics and ideas on what to do next.” Lots of ideas, more than you have time to implement, but it will definitely get you thinking.

And NunoXEI found a Scott McCloud comic that explains Google Chrome. Fun, but technical.