It’s said that we make our own luck. I believe that, at least most of the time. We can’t always control our circumstances, but we don’t have to have our circumstances control us. (Do you like that? Just call me Pastor Florien.)
Richard Wiseman did a study on “lucky” & “unlucky” people. I found his analysis fascinating:
Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.
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.
Wiseman created a “luck school” to see if he could train people to be luckier. He succeeded:
I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. 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 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school”, she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.
Here’s his conclusion:
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.
That’s the kind of person I want to be, and I’ve noticed the more I am like that, the more opportunities seem to come my way.
Do you think of yourself as lucky or unlucky? Do you agree that your personality and perspective in life affects that view?
Yep. I’m the kind who would miss the 2-inch-high print. Sad.
Sometimes I feel so lucky, I’m scared. Truly. When things going great, the only other way is down. The problem with being lucky is that bad luck hurts a lot.
We may have to put our cat down this weekend, but I still feel lucky to have had a snuggly, gregarious cat in our lives for over thirteen years.
wasn’t there a RadioLab about this?
I’m the kind of guy who would’ve seen the print, and then kept on counting because I didn’t trust it. Does this mean that I’m a lucky guy who makes unlucky decisions?
That was my thought: If I saw it I wouldn’t trust it. The part about getting money for noticing it, however…Well. I would’ve definitely heeded that.
The point is, though, that you would have seen it. Trusting it is a different issue, I think. Though I expect ultra-paranoid people are not very “lucky” either.
I don’t believe in luck at all. Life is what it is, and it’s all a matter of what I do with what happens. I believe I’m an extremely happy person though.
Is that lucky?
Ummm! It is always difficult to determine whether presented information has a kernel of truth to it or, conversely, is simply another variation of “woo”. This article fostered that particular conflict for me. In the original work, I saw no references to other supporting peer reviewed articles, no data on research conducted by the original author. Only homilies and bromides. The article’s original author offered some bits of information that are consistent with what we (psychologists) know about the interaction of human sensory perception and human emotion. Sometimes they work well together, providing valid and actionable choices. Yet, sometimes, not so well. Sometimes the result can be less than lucky.
For example, take the original author’s statement that “Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches”. Well, yes and no. A “hunch” is a guess. Sometimes a hunch is correct, sometimes it is not correct. Will you accept a policeman’s assessment that he had a “hunch” that you were speeding? How about your physician in the area of potential cancer? How about an engineer about the safety of a bridge you drive on every day? Should the degree of potential harm as a result of acting on such “hunches” affect your behavior? It should if you want to continue in this life!
The original author states “Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune”. Yes, psychology has long known that, generally, a positive attitude leads to a more enjoyable experience of life. While serving in the army in my youth (2/327 Inf., 101st Airborne, Vietnam 67-69) I had a fellow tell me that he could dodge raindrops. So, he runs out into a driving rainstorm and, upon his return, states “See!” (in my conventionalized reality, he appeared to be soaked to the bone). A positive attitude goes only so far. I kept a positive attitude that I would never be wounded. That was a correctly positive attitude on many days, except for the two times it was not. I learned quickly to keep my head and ass down. Good advice, even when you do feel lucky.
Yes, being positive about life is great. It helps you immensely. But, too much positiveness can get you or someone else killed, or injured, or mightily embarrassed. Positiveness is good, but so is caution and single mindedness. Its the knack of knowing how to balance these factors that is important.
Austin,
The physician might have a hunch to take a second look at that x-ray, or to run another lab test. He could have noticed something “subconsciously” that actually bore checking out. And the engineer may have missed on order of magnitude in a calculation, that again was gnawing at him unconsciously, and followed his intuition to run the numbers again. I think this type of hunch followed up by verification may be what Wiseman is talking about.
wow, so “the secret” is true……….
It can’t be. otherwise I’d have a prehensile tail by now.
“The Secret” is not true, in that a person cannot magnetize the universe to attract their desires through the power of quantum mechanics. It is true on the level that a person can make subconcious choices such that it appears that they are magnetizing and attracting their desires.
If you’re standing a a bus stop and the guy next to you gets hit in the head by a stray bullet fired by someone a mile away at a target range, are you lucky? Did your attitude help you avoid the bullet? Everything is exactly as it should be: Determined by random chance.
There are certainly multiple types of luck. I have not had the luck to win the lottery. I don’t play the lottery. I have not wasted thousands of dollars a year as some people do trying to win the lottery. So I am lucky in this regard.
On a related note, years ago there was an article in Scientific American, the gist of which was that nothing in the physical universe (from the smallest particle to the largest star) can change in any way without the cooperation of everything else (including the smallest particle to the largest star) in the physical universe. Relativity in the extreme. I believe the author used the word “permission” to describe the phenomenon. An example would be that you cannot move your hand two inches to the right without the “permission” of every physical particle in existence allowing it to happen. Nor can a sunspot form on the surface of a star a million light-years away without the “permission” of every particle in existence, including the very last atom at the end of the longest piece of hair on your head. His logic (if not his science, per se, as I don’t remember it) supporting this theory was sound.
I remember thinking at the time how well this idea fit in with the concepts of destiny and luck.
Even with the give and take and “permission” of the universe, I still believe that life is governed primarily by random chance.
I’m surprised no-one has commented on the line “Richard Wiseman did a study on “lucky” & “lucky” people.” Did he study lucky people twice? No unlucky people? Is this another example of lucky? I always feel lucky and I saw it.
Darn, maybe I’m unlucky! :)
Seems to me ” unlucky” people are more fastidious and accurate. If they had acted on the £250 prize offer they would have been disappointed as it was just ” for fun” . It is an attitudinal issue as luck does not exist!!!
haha, I totally missed that! AND I consider myself fairly unlucky. I need to take some of this advice…
“Do you think of yourself as lucky or unlucky?”
Neither. Lucky or lack thereof relates to matters of chance over which I have no control. (Winning a raffle etc…) This study doesn’t really address luck at all, it addresses the way people perceive things and make choices over which they do have control.
I don’t think anyone here would argue that you can improve your chances of winning the lottery by being more attentive or relaxed or whatever. I’d say luck is used in a broader sense.
Yes – it’s being used in a broader sense. But the sense in which it’s being used is not about “luck” at all. It’s about things we have control over.
I think there is some truth to The Secret, or the law of attraction. Not in a literal sense, but generally. If I expect good things to happen, it is much more likely that they do. If I’m in a negative spiral, all I see is negative, and bad things tend to come at me more. The trick, for me, is to get out of negative thinking asap. This is difficult, when you’re feeling depressed, or lonely, or overwhelmed, or just generally pissed off. It has happened to me over and over again, where if I am able to change my attitude, good things come my way. It’s not always easy to do this, though. I don’t know exactly what it is, but for me, it has certainly worked. For good & bad.
I am a great believer in the fact that anyone can create their own luck by keeping their eyes open. All those people who think they are the type that “can’t see” the obvious (like the one in the experiment about the number of pictures in the paper) can all learn how to be lucky if they are willing to follow some steps to make changes in the way they approach things. I have recently started writing a blog about how people can do this. I started my adult life in a homeless hostel for teenagers but I turned my life around to become a successful entrepreneur by spotting opportunities and making my own luck.
I forgot to add that if anyone is interested in looking at my blog about creating luck the link is http://mattkinsella.com/blog-2