Why Some People Have All the Luck

By Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks theydeserve?A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some peopleare always in the right place at the right time, while others consistentlyexperience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapersasking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and overthe years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them takepart in experiments.The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight intothe causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible formuch of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chanceopportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities,whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due todifferences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both luckyand unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tellme how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large messagehalfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seenthis and win $50."This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was morethan two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but theunlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxietydisrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on lookingfor something else. They go to parties' intent on finding their perfectpartner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look throughnewspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and missother types of jobs. The lucky ones make the best of what they have and findways to make it better. Unlucky ones tend to find an easy way out and failin life.Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is thererather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually revealedthat lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They areskilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisionsby listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies viapositive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms badluck into good.

Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could beused to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a monthcarrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a luckyperson.Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities,listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to badluck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what hadhappened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, moresatisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky.Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor".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 find ways to make things work better.Family and loved ones for a start.
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephonecall.

Have a Lucky day and work for it.The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems, butthose who learn to live with things that are less than perfect.