Are you lucky?

This weekend a friend and I were discussing the success of a mutual friend. In our discussion my friend attributed the onset of this person’s success to luck! “He was lucky to have landed that big account, which has driven the success of his business ever since”.

This got me thinking, would our successful friend refer to himself as lucky? Or, would he say that he worked very hard to land that very important client which then led to further success…

When we deem someone “lucky” in opposition to ourselves aren’t we self victimizing? Insinuating that someone else’s success is attributed to luck and our self perceived inability to gain success as being “unlucky”, we are creating a situation in which we are not in control and thus a casualty to life.

When we see ourselves as a “causality” we abandon our cognizant responsibility. In other words, we fail to take accountability for our life, our choices, our failure to step up and steer our life in the direction we want it to go.

Do I believe in luck? I’m not sure… I think I believe we make our own luck! - I believe we forge our own path, the positives and negatives we attract are a result of what we have put out. I do though, believe that bad things happen (I think there is another saying for this, starts with an “S” and ends with a “T”) as a result of universal equilibrium (a topic for another day).

In researching this topic, it appears that Prof. Richard Wiseman author of The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, would agree. Dr. Wiseman has spent eight years investigating why some people appear to be consistently lucky or unlucky. He claims it is not intelligence or psychic ability, but the approach one takes towards their life that matters.

Prof. Wiseman has devised four principles of luck:

• Principle One: Maximize Chance Opportunities: Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.
  
• Principle Two: Listening to Lucky Hunches: Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.
  
• Principle Three: Expect Good Fortune: Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.
  
• Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good: Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on the ill fortune, and take control of the situation.
  

http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/wiseman/research/luckfactor.html


Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work -- and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't. – Lucille Ball

Ciao for now

Aurea

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