How To Reliably Create Your Own Luck
This is an excerpt from The Luck Factor, a 10-year scientific study of luck. It leads with some stuff about superstition which deters most people from getting to the good stuff. So here is a summary.
Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles.
1. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities
2. Make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition
3. Create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations
4. Adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a very 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.
On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds.
Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over 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.
And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance 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 type of job advertisements and as a result 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.
