Why Good Luck Is All In The Mind.
Do you experience good luck all time? Everything always coming up roses?
Or are you the opposite? That nothing remotely lucky ever happens to you.
It’s no surprise. Luck, actually, tends to be more of a belief that an actual blessing.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a well known TV and broadcasting psychologist, was highly interested in the whole subject of luck. In the early 1990’s he embarked on a ten year study into luck to see if people were truly lucky…..or not. He ran adverts in national papers asking for people to become involved in the study who believed they were either incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky.
From this 400 were chosen to embark on the luck factor research. His aim was to examine the actual beliefs and life story experiences of both sets of people to determine if there was any factor(s) that lay at the root of their luck/non luck. His study was in depth involving keeping diaries, completing questionnaires, and participating in experiments. This 10 year programme was the first and biggest of its kind in the world.
So, what did he find? Who exactly really does enjoy good luck?
Good Beliefs = Good Fortune.
Well, from the title of this post, you can probably work out the outcome.
His groundbreaking exercise and findings were shared in his best selling book, ‘The Luck Factor’.
His studies showed that people were as lucky as they believed themselves to be. This was underpinned by 4 key traits, namely –
- They create self-fulfilling predictions through positive expectations.
- They adopt a resilient attitude under all circumstances turning lesser luck into greater luck.
- They have become skilled at noticing and creating chance opportunities that they follow.
- They make beneficial decisions through trusting their intuition.
Putting the four together in one human led to one good turn of fortune after another. Let me share a perfect example.
Luck hangs around.
In ‘The Luck Factor’, Richard Wiseman tells the tale of Barnett Helzberg Jr who had built up a fairly successful jewellery business. He was now 60 years of age and wanted to sell the company and read the means by which famous investor Warren Buffett bought companies. He decided he was the man but didn’t know how to be able to have a conversation with him. That was still in his mind in 1994 in visiting New York when, by chance as he was walking past The Plaza Hotel, he heard a woman call out ‘Mr Buffett’.
Seeing the man she was referring to, there and then he decided to walk over to him and introduce himself. And guess what? It was indeed Warren Buffett. One year later he agreed a deal to buy all of Barnett’s stores and he retired a wealthy man.
And it works the other way round too.
Croation Frane Selak reputedly survived a train crash, plane crash, a bus crash into water, a car fire and explosion, a head on lorry smash, and being struck by a bus. Some don’t fully believe they all actually occurred they way he described but there is an interesting epilogue to the story. Selak did believe he was lucky and one story is undisputed. In 2010 in the last of his amazing life events, he won over £700,000 in the Croatian Lottery!
That’s what happens when you believe in luck. It kind of hangs around. And it darn well sticks too.
Your own story, like those above, has been your life. And has that story been a lucky one? If not then it’s probably that you didn’t think and believe in all things lucky being a lifelong counterpart with you to the end. You can change that today.
Because good luck is in your head before it’s in your life.
References – Richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Wikipedia – Frano Selak.