Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Those who think they're unlucky should change their outlook and
discover how to generate good fortune, says Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman

Published in the Telegraph: 12:01AM 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.

Richard
Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His book,
The Luck Factor (Century), is available for £9.99 + £1.99 p&p. To
order, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.