Richard
Wiseman12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003
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.
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