Why Some People Have All the Luck?

Good one!

Why Some People Have All the Luck?

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.

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 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.

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."