By Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire-
Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks theydeserve?
A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.
Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some peopleare always in the right place at the right time, while others consistentlyexperience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapersasking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research andover the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had themtake part in experiments.
The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight intothe causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible formuch of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chanceopportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities,whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due todifferences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both luckyand unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tellme how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large messagehalfway through the newspaper saying: 'Tell the experimenter you have seenthis and win $50.'
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was morethan two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, butthe 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 anxietydisrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.
As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused onlooking for something else.
They go to parties intent on finding theirperfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They lookthrough newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisementsand miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is thererather than just what they are looking for. My research eventuallyrevealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. Theyare skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make luckydecisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfillingprophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude thattransforms bad luck into good.
Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could beused to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a monthcarrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a luckyperson.
Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities,listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to badluck.
One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened.The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfiedwith 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 (yes indeed)
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.
Have a nice day
(umi thanks for the for email ;)
