Making your own luck

This is a story I read today at work about well-off people and how they got there. The first story was about a retired actor and bookstore owner named Jason. This was the end of the story and its message really struck me and so I thought I would share it...



"It was really an inadvertent thing," Jason said of the profitable market niche he had stumbled on. After a moment, he added, "If I made a list of all the things in life I thought were coincidences and then looked back at them, I would see that they weren't coincidences at all."

Exactly.

Jason exemplifies the traits that British researcher Richard Wiseman ascribed to lucky people in a 2003 article called The Luck Factor: "They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."

In one experiment, Wiseman asked two groups of people - one who described themselves as generally lucky and one who said they were usually unlucky - to count the photographs in a newspaper. The unluckies spent several minutes flipping through and counting the photos. The lucky people got it in a few seconds. How? On page 2, Wiseman had inserted a message in giant headline type: "Stop counting - There are 43 photographs in this newspaper."

The lucky people, always on the lookout for unexpected good fortune, spotted it right away. The unlucky people, whose minds are closed to such signs, missed it completely.

Jason would have gotten the message.

Gasp, another post...

Well, well, well, will wonders never cease. Look I posted again and it hasn't been a month in-between. What alacrity the crowd mummurs, but doesn't realize that I am in-between classes and haven't been doing much gardening. I could ramble on about doings and happenings as Teri and I are gearing up for back to school stuff (imagine taking a 16 year old male teenager school clothes shopping when he doesn't want to be there) but instead I think I will post about my fantasy football team The Hawaiian Punch and our soon to be draft. I have been given the 6th pick which once again puts me in a quandry as to whom do I pick... The first 3 picks should be gimmes with LJ, then LT, then Shaun Alexander, Clinton Portis will probably go fourth even though he dislocated his shoulder recently. 5,6,7 get interesting though as the experts have Tiki Barber at 5 and Edge at 6, neither of which overwhelms me. I have been toying with the idea of taking Lamont Jordan at the spot since I had him last year and was pleased with his performance and he is rated number 7. Yet, Martin, since he doesn't like any of the aforementioned 3, has been trying to convince me to go with the running back slotted at #8, Rudi Johnson of the Bengals, and I will admit that the thought is tempting, as he also has been solid the last few years, although I think he might be a reach at 6th overall.

On another front, UFC is coming up this Saturday and it should be an excellent card, especially if this last Thursday's TUF card was any indication. I was actually impressed with the fights presented, which is saying a lot since I have thought a lot of the matches lately have been mediocre at best. We will have to see what Teri, Martin, Kerry, and I think about things Saturday night...

Loosing the oomph

I don't know, for whatever reason, I haven't wanted to blog lately. I could blame it on the classes I am taking, or maybe on the fact that nobody else seems to blog to much anymore, and I don't have the energy to go out and find new blog groupies, or even on the fact that I have been real real busy with the new baby coming, but realistically it is just a sense of ennui that has come over me. I do have anti-social tendencies and I think they are raising their heads. Come on people, give me a reason to blog more...