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.
posted by Unknown at 6:37 PM
5 Comments:
I wonder if it is luck or that they are that more observant of their surroundings. Is it luck that a man finds a quarter while walking down the street or is it that his eye caught the glimmer of it off the sidewalk?
I think that the point being made was that "lucky" people have a different mindset as they are always on the lookout for good fortune whereas "unlucky" people are more closed minded.
Good study. I'd have to say I agree, completely. The "lucky" know the right opportunities and jump at them... there's a lot to be said about listening to that "little voice" inside your head.
Another group never notices when people comment on their blog till a few days later. Which group do you fall into?
Anyway stops for stopping by. I was going to do a new post myself based on something an old friend recently said to me. Joseph he said, you're writing is absolutely hilarious... so why does your blog suck so bad?
Very interesting post. I agree that those folks that generally do well look for opportunity, whereas those that don't tend to focus on the negative and have a tendency to go to that opposite extreme
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