Professor Richard Wiseman,
University of Hertfordshire
Why do some people get all the
luck while others never get the breaks they deserve ? Ten years ago, I set out to examine
luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the
right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune. I placed
advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently
lucky or unlucky to contact me. Hundreds of extraordinary men and
women volunteered for my research and over the years, I have interviewed them,
monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments.
The results reveal that although
these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their
thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune.
Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently
encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a simple experiment
to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such
opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them
to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly
placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the
experimenter you have seen this and win $50." This message took up half of the
page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring
everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the
lucky people tended to spot it.
Unlucky people are generally more
tense than lucky people and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the
unexpected and they miss
opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They
go to parties' intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities
to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain
types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more relaxed and
open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking
for. My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune
via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance
opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create
self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude
that transforms bad luck into good.
Towards the end of the work, I
wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a
group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help
them think and behave like a lucky person.Dramatic results! These exercises
helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be
lucky, and be more resilient to bad
luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened.
The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with
their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. The lucky people had
become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky. Finally, I had found the elusive
"luck factor".
1) Listen to your gut instincts -
they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and
breaking your normal routine
3) Spend a few moments each day
remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky
before an important meeting or telephone call.
"Happiest people are not
those who have no problems or things fall perfect for them … but those who
learn to cherish with things that are less than perfect."
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