Make Your Own Luck!

By Author: Carolyn Clayton
Total Articles: 497
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'Luck is believing you're lucky' - Tennessee Williams

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? There may be more you can do about improving your luck than you think.

Dr Richard Wiseman interviewed people who felt they were unusually lucky or unlucky and published his findings*. He believes that people's thoughts and behaviour 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.

Dr Wiseman gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He 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. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Anxiety
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. Unlucky people 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 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. Dr Wiseman's research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles:
- skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities
- make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition
- create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations,
- adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:

1. Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
2. Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
3. Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4. Visualise yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call (luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy).

A blessing in disguise
Everyone experiences bad fortune at some point during their lives. However, these seemingly unlucky events often have an uncanny way of working out for the best in the long run. When bad things happen, spend a few moments thinking about how the event might be a blessing in disguise, and how you can make good luck flow from your apparent ill fortune. When a lucky person fails a job interview, they might think, 'Well, maybe it was meant to be - after all, it means that I am still in the job market and so perhaps I will now find an even better job, one that I would have missed if I had been offered the first job'.
You cannot change the bad luck that has happened to you, but you can control how you respond to your apparent misfortune.

Further reading:
*'The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind' by Dr Richard Wiseman, (Arrow Books) 2004

'The Little Book of Luck' by Dr Richard Wiseman, (Arrow Books), 2004
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