Psychologist Richard Wiseman says, "Ten years ago, I set out
to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are
always in the right place at the right time, while others
consistently experience ill fortune." He says he's found the
answer.
Wiseman writes in bbcnews.com that he placed ads in
national newspapers asking for people who felt they were
always either lucky or unlucky to contact him, so he got lots
of volunteers to study. He says, "The results reveal that
although these people have almost no insight into the causes
of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for
much of their good and bad fortune."
He found that lucky people consistently encounter chance
opportunities, while unlucky people don't. Since this doesn't
make sense statistically, Wiseman studied them and found
that lucky people were the ones who were able to spot the
opportunities that came their way.
He says, "I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper,
and asked them to look through it and tell me how many
photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large
message halfway through the newspaper saying, 'Tell the
experimenter you have seen this and win ?250.' This message
took up half of the page and was written in type that was
more than two inches 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."
He found that unlucky people are more tense and depressed,
perhaps because they expect the worst, and this disrupts
their ability to notice what's going on around them. Wiseman
says, "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 miss other types of jobs."
He says, "I asked a group of 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% of people were now happier, more
satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all,
luckier."
Here?s what Wiseman told them to do: "Listen to your gut
instincts?they are normally right. Be open to new
experiences and breaking your normal routine. Spend a few
moments each day remembering things that went well.
Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or
telephone call. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Roger Leir has a new DVD/VHS out that shows actual
implant removal surgeries from abductees who were lucky
enough to get help from him. He warns: "This tape is not for
the faint of heart!"
To learn more,
click here and here.
