25th April, 2022
Some years ago, a psychologist set out to examine luck. He wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune.
He placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact him.
Hundreds of extraordinary men & women volunteered for his research.
Over the years, he interviewed them, monitored their lives & had them take part in experiments.
The results revealed that although these people had almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour were responsible for much of their good luck & bad fortune.
Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.
He carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.
He gave both, the so called lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it & 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 $50.”
This message took up half of the page & 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 & 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 parties, intent on finding their perfect partner & so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements & miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more relaxed & open, and therefore see what is there & manage to grab opportunities, rather than just what they are looking for.
His research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles.
• They are skilled at creating & 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, he wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. He asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think & behave like a lucky person.
Dramatic results were witnessed!
One month later, the volunteers returned & described what had happened.
The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives & perhaps most important of all, luckier.
The lucky people had become even luckier & the unlucky had become lucky.
Finally, he had found the elusive “luck factor”.
Here are the Professors 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 all that went well.
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.
Create your own Luck, be Lucky & Stay Blessed forever!