How to learn to be lucky

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire  in the U.K. who researched how to be lucky and wrote a book about it called The Luck Factor. He published a piece giving highlights of his research findings on Jan. 9, 2003, at the Web site of the British newspaper, the Telegraph:

… 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 [note: boldfacing by CY]:

• 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.

FYI — the book I advertise on this site, How to Get Lots of Money for Anything — Fast by Stuart Lichtman, includes information on how to become much luckier. It covers far more than generating and attracting money and while I may not be wealthy, Stuart’s book has, literally, been a life-saver for me. For more information, including how to buy it, see the advertisement below this post.

Thanks to Stuart’s book I am able to recognize that Dr. Wiseman makes sound observations about the differences between the lucky and the unlucky and his principles to apply to become luckier — and since you, my dear gentle reader, are lucky enough to be reading this, I thought I would share the infomation to give you some tools you can use to make yourself even luckier.