By Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire
Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they
deserve?
A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.
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 behaviour 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.
As a result, 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. The lucky ones make the best of what they have and find
ways to make it better. Unlucky ones tend to find an easy way out and fail
in life.
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".
Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:
1) Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and find ways to make things work better.
Family and loved ones for a start.
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone
call.
Have a Lucky day and work for it.
The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems, but those who learn to live with things that are less than perfect.
Personally, I would define 'luck' as 'blessed'. So, yeah. Life is all about ups and downs! 8) Up or down, I choose to be happy! Woooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooo! 8D
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