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 ext rao rdinary 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.