Have you achieved much in your life? The chances are probably very slim. It's hard to be motivated to go out and actually do stuff that requires effort when Netflix is literally a click away and girls that might love me are just a swipe away, and god that's so much better for my anxiety than having to make actual small talk with people who can barely hear me in dimly lit bars.
If I had to rank my greatest achievements it would be these, in no particular order:
- When I was around four and I was out shopping on the streets with my Mum. I told her I needed a toilet. She took me into a side street to go for a wee. I squatted and shat down a drain.
- Swimming my 200 metres in 25 minutes. My instructor told me it was one of the slowest things he'd ever seen and everyone else in my class had gone home because they were tired of waiting.
- This (see below)
- Seeing Nicklas Bendtner score a hat trick against Porto.
- Winning £5 off 20P on a fruit machine by simply hitting buttons and shouting swear words.
I have, to put it bluntly, achieved very little. Almost nothing. If I were to ask my Mum if she was proud of me she would say 'yes' without hesitation, but she would almost certainly avoid eye contact with me.
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However, I have achieved something no-one in the history of mankind has ever achieved before. And you have too.
All you did was shuffle a deck of cards.
This sound familiar? Probably because it was on last night's episode of QI on Dave at about 10 PM, or maybe it was Dave Ja Vu at 11 PM.
Basically, no two people have ever shuffled a deck of cards the same way ever, the chances are infinitesimally small.
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"The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is '52 factorial' otherwise known as 52! or 52 shriek. This is 52 times 51 times 50 . . . all the way down to one," it says on the QI website.
The number of possible permutations looks like this: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,
975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
Which, funnily enough is how many times they play the same episode of Top Gear on Dave each day.
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But to give you more of an idea, Stephen Fry explained it like this on the show: "If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang, they'd only just now be starting to repeat shuffles."
So there you go, don't let haters tell you you ain't shit, you have made history, you've done something no-one has ever done before.
You are proof that anyone can achieve the extraordinary.
Words by Matthew Cooper
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Lead Image Credit: PA
Featured Image Credit:Topics: History