FEEL
LUCKY, PUNK? WELL, DO YA?
This article,
from which excerpts are taken, was written about luck and
was published in the Telegraph in the UK in 2003. It is
written by Richard Wiseman who wrote the book The Luck Factor
which is an excellent read.
A decade ago,
I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact
on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks
and being in the right place at the right time. After many
experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people
are luckier than others and that it is possible to become
luckier…………..
Take the case of 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. 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 more than 2in 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.
For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through
the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter
you have seen this and win £250." Again, the
unlucky people missed the opportunity because they
were still too busy looking for photographs.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally
much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown
that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected.
In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot
in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large
dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen.
Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.
The experiment was then repeated with a second group of
people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately
watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became
focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them
missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen.
The harder they looked, the
less they saw……..
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
types 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.
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune
via four basic 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.
In the wake of these studies,
I think there are three easy techniques that can help to
maximise good fortune:
• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition
when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect
hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think
and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking
at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps
them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason
to consider a decision carefully.
• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine.
They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk
to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many
lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives.
For example, one person described how he thought of a colour
before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to
people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour
boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing
variety.
• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their
ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse.
