Lost Wanderer

Here is a short summary of what I could find on-line about what it takes to be lucky. 

Being lucky in life isn’t a matter of having greater numbers of purely random positive things happen to you.  Lucky people have no greater chance of winning the lottery than anyone else, and lucky people don’t believe in, or count on, this sort of luck.

Lucky people enjoy new experiences, and are positive and believe that things generally will work out for the best.  They expect to enjoy meeting new and different people.  This attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since because of it they often do enjoy meeting those new people.  They enjoy the moment, appreciate the things that have gone right in their lives, and do not envy others.  They might even spend a few minutes each day counting their blessings, and in this way they help control negative emotions.  Lucky people engage in what is called positive counter-factual thinking.  If they experience a misfortune they would probably think, “How lucky I am, it could have been so much worse.”  Unlucky people do the opposite. 

Lucky people will often intentionally try to add variety to their lives to give themselves more chances for novel opportunities.  They are also better at noticing the opportunities they come across, while unlucky people don’t notice those comparatively fewer opportunities that they do have.  For example, when given the task of searching a paper for photos, unlucky people won’t typically notice a large print message on the second page that says, “Stop counting:  There are 43 photographs in this paper.” lucky people will.  This is because unlucky people are often too tense and busy looking for what they expect or hope to see.  They tend to have one tracked agendas, sort of like a desperate person grasping for a life-ring, and can’t see what else might be there and capitalize on it.  They will go to a party looking to meet their one true love, and miss out on the chance to make good friends.  Lucky people are also better prepared to take advantage of their opportunities, because they have done their homework, and developed their professional and social skills.  (Or, as Samuel Goldwyn put it, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”)

From an overarching meta-perspective, lucky people have a clear sense of their priorities and goals, and will sometimes review these to make sure they are on track.  They are motivated to take charge of their lives, and are proactive about anticipating and obviating many potential troubles.  Bad things happen to them too, but they don’t dwell on such misfortunes, and they take positive steps to prevent them from happening again.  They actually will sometimes find opportunities in problems, because if they have a problem others might have it too.  If someone can solve it for himself then he can sell the solution to others.  Success often comes from solving problems for other people, and many great fortunes were founded on great problems. 

Lucky people are very realistic when appraising chances of success or failure, make decisions based on legitimate probabilities, and taking reasonable chances.  When it’s a good bet, they can be very persistent, and since they have generally positive expectations they will expend more effort than a pessimist.  Yet they don’t bet on losing hands, and will get out fast and cut their losses when the odds don’t favor them.  They are also better at knowing the difference, because they are experts at figuring the probabilities in their area of expertise.  Not that it is all number crunching, because lucky people also listen to their gut instincts.  (Researchers suggest that you can improve these instincts by meditation.)

In summary, lucky people have positive attitudes, look at the bright side, count their blessings, are extroverts, enjoy the things they have, and try to incorporate a variety of new experiences into their lives.  They are open to chance opportunities, and are well prepared to take advantage of them.  They are proactive, reasonable risk takers, have good instincts, and often see problems as opportunities.  They know what they want, and have a realistic understanding of how to get it. 

The good news is that many of these behaviors, habits of thought, and attitude aren’t immutable.  When a group of unlucky people were trained in how to apply the principles of good luck, 80% of them were happier and more satisfied with their lives. 

In thinking about the above discussion, it’s clear that outcomes in life fall on a continuum running from the entirely predictable to the entirely unpredictable.  Something like success on the SAT, for a person who has had a lot of prior success on similar tests, would be a fairly predictable outcome.  And a person who does well in such a situation probably won’t see the outcome so much as a matter of luck, but more a matter of talent.  However, in those areas of life where prediction is much more complicated and uncertain, such as business ventures, people recognize that such outcomes are more a matter of chance, and so if they succeed they might often say they were just “lucky.”  But, in fact, over a large number of these sorts of events, there are a variety of personal characteristics that, to a degree, will shift the odds.  And, since success often breeds success, the likelihood of overall success in life can dramatically change depending on whether or not one has those, ”luck,” favoring characteristics.     

 For further reading see: Richard Wiseman’s, How to Get Lucky, The loser’s guide to getting lucky, The Luck Factor, the book: The Luck Factor;  Charles Burke’s, The Seven Simple Secrets of Naturally Lucky People;  Steve Gillman’s Secrets of Lucky People; and the Top 10 Secrets of Lucky People.

Tags: Luck, Success

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.