Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it. The greatest skill at cards is to know when to discard... When in doubt, follow the suit of the wise and prudent.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Strip the superstition, rewrite luck-contagion as pattern-contagion, and the advice stands. Some people generate their outcomes: the partner who is always mid-crisis, always wronged, always about to be fine; the collaborator whose projects reliably collapse from the same preventable cause. Associate long enough and you inherit the pattern twice over: their chaos consumes your margins, and the market starts pricing you as a set. The reverse holds equally. People with sound patterns, deadlines met, promises kept, drama declined, lift your baseline just by proximity. Choose associations like investments, because they are.
Practice
- Before partnering, study track record over charm: what happened, repeatedly, around this person?
- Distinguish a person in a bad season from a person who manufactures bad seasons; help the first, limit exposure to the second.
- Do the mirror check: which pattern do people inherit by standing next to you?
Use this when
- Use this for business partners, co-signers, and long collaborations, anywhere the exit is expensive.
- Use the discard rule on projects too: the smallest current trump beats last game's ace.
Ignore this when
- Don't weaponise it into abandoning the genuinely unlucky; misfortune is not a character verdict, and loyalty in real trouble is the point of having character (maxim 285 draws that line).
- Don't blame contagion for what is simply your own pattern travelling with you.
A picture of it
A founder needs a technical co-founder and the charming candidate is available immediately, which should have been the first question. Two previous ventures, both dead, both, in his telling, other people's fault. The founder checks with one person from each wreck; the stories rhyme. She chooses the slower, duller candidate whose last two teams still speak to him. The company survives its second year, which, statistically, was the whole game.
You cannot catch someone's luck. Their habits, invoices, and reputation transfer within months.