Good Luck

Dan Pink wrote this fun piece about Richard Wiseman's book, The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles in Fast Company this July, which I never got a chance to read.

Read the quote below to give you an idea of what Wiseman came up with. BTW, I love this stuff because I'm such a lucky, upbeat, optimistic person -- I'm VERY biased on this subject.

"Wiseman's four principles turn out to be slightly more polished renditions of some of the self-help canon's greatest hits. One thing Wiseman discovered, for example, was that when things go awry, the lucky "turn bad luck into good" by seeing how they can squeeze some benefit from the misfortune. (Lemonade, anyone?) The lucky also "expect good fortune," which no doubt has Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking , grinning in his grave.

But if these insights aren't exactly groundbreaking, neither are they wrongheaded. For instance, Wiseman found that lucky people are particularly open to possibility. Why do some people always seem to find fortune? It's not dumb luck. Unlike everyone else, they see it. "Most people are just not open to what's around them," Wiseman says. "That's the key to it."

Here's the link to the whole interview with Wiseman, check it out.

I'm a terrible Pollyanna and have had bad things happen that I always seem able to put a good spin on -- it gets almost tedious for some people around me. Screw 'em! I see the good in most situations and almost always see the good in most people.

Listen to this funny experiment Richard Wiseman describes in the interview:

"We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice."