On luck…

Came across this article recently, and thought it would be a great one to share. I am also a believer in ‘objective optimism’ and found this story really interesting! The work is from Richard Wiseman who is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. Enjoy!

And please comment with your reactions…

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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.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and
magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to
contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for
my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student,
the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As
she explained: “I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy
whom I love very much. It’s amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise
I have been lucky in just about every area.”

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the
unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in
a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree
during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was
always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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.

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.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the
amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I
created a “luck school” – a simple experiment that examined whether people’s
luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky
person.

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.

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. In one interview, a lucky
volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had
fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and
he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out,
he could have broken his neck.