Lim Kopi Fridays Videos

00:00 :

Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Lim kopi Fridays with Adrian. I’m Adrian, and today we are going to talk about a little experience that I had when I went up to Genting Highlands for a mini gambling trip.

00:19 :

It is not actually a gambling trip. But since we are there, why not? And the last time when I was there, it was probably more than 10 years ago and my experience with casino is never really good. It doesn’t produce any results at all. 9 out of 10 times I will lose money. And in fact, this time I actually give myself an expectation that I will lose up to $100, Singapore dollars and I will stop for the rest of the trip. Now, in the past, $100 would probably last me about close to one hour. That’s how bad my luck was. But this time around things started to change and I’m going to share with you what change and how and what we can learn from this experience of mine.

01:09 :

Now back in Genting Highlands, we were there for four days and we initially wanted to go on the first day, just to lose the hundred dollars and be prepared to spend the rest of the days eating, shopping, and do other things. To our surprise, when I was there on the first day, I won about $50. Yes, and that was after I lose about $100 So in fact, if I were to calculate the highest winning on the first day right, it was $150. $150, I lost 100 it became 50. Now on the second day, it kind of like repeated the same pattern.

01:51 :

I was up close to about $250 and I lost all the way down to winning $75. Not too bad, not too bad, because in the past I would probably have lost the whole hundred dollars within the first day. And now after two days I’m up $125. Now, guess what? On the third day we decided to go up again and try our luck. And on the third day, things started to change. I was up close, in total, I was probably up close to $500 including the first two days winnings, supposed winnings. And eventually I lost all of them and I came back with a positive $20. And that was a big lesson learned from me.

02:41 :

Now, what can we see from this financial rollercoaster of the three days while I was there? Number one, even if you have a bad experience before, even if you have set your own expectations, when things happen for you, your confidence will skyrocket. And it’s important for us to recognise this change in emotions and not to be too overconfident, when we are confident. It’s very easy to fall into the trap though, so the idea is to be aware of it. And the second lesson that we can learn from this is that in fact there were a lot of times that I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.

03:21 :

Reasons are I started seeing signs that my luck is going to turn around, things are going to turn around for me and I only recognise that towards the end after I lost that 2/3 of the total winnings that I felt that hey, something is wrong, I better stop and forget about it. And that was why I was still able to come back out with that $50 or $75 on the second day. So the key here is not to fall to

03:53 :

the trap of taking every signs, as a sign that you may be coming back because most of them, if not all of them, are actually wrong. They are just there to lure you in even further. If it doesn’t happen now, they will lure you in the next time as well, because all this experience accumulates and it remains in you. And once you have had that experience before, you always feel that you can always come back to it. And number three on the third day I find myself just losing my head, because I was up close to $500 and I lost close to about $400 and I thought that, OK, maybe I’ll just try another time, and I find myself being restless and not paying attention.

04:45 :

Like for the first two days I was quite excited about the noise and the sound of the jackpot machine. But on the last day where I was losing, I just keep pressing the button. So and that’s where I realised, oh, I’m really left with $20, I better stop. I wouldn’t want to lose even more. So this teaches us that sometimes when things are not in our favour, it’s important for us to stay level-headed and to really think through what’s best for us at that point of time.

05:19 :

To summarise, my trip to Genting Highlands is like a microscopic experience of how we are facing financial stress every day. Sometimes we may have newfound confidence from a low expectation and that actually swing our emotions around. Now sometimes we may feel overconfident and we started to look out for signs and we started to think that, oh, things is working in our favour already. A sometimes we may lose our head chasing after the next thing after the next shiny object.

05:55 :

And over time, we may lose track of our expenses, we may lose track of what we really want and they actually create additional stress for us after some time when we start to look back into our lives. So I hope that this mini experience of mine can help you open up in terms of looking at where you are right now, if you’re currently facing some of these situations or where you might be heading towards that you don’t really think that you’re heading towards, but you are there. And to stop you from diving deeper into situations where you know it’s not favourable for you now or for your family now and in the future.

06:39 :

Hope this helps and I’ll see you in the next video.