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The loser's guide to
getting lucky
By Professor Richard
Wiseman
University of Hertfordshire
Updated 10/22/04
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 behavior
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 $250."
This message took up
half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high.
Anxiety
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 party’s 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.
Self-fulfilling
prophecies
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:
I Should Be So Lucky
is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday mornings, at 0930 GMT.
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So, in conclusion, Don’t be unlucky. Make the choices that will make you successful.