Changing Your Luck

In this week's New Age Notebook, I am going to address a subject that often comes up in the chat rooms: LUCK. Why is it that some people seem to be born with horseshoes up the wazoo while others battle an endless string of disasters and setbacks?Is there such thing as being born under a lucky star? Is it karma or a curse? While some are eternal victims of Murphy's Law: "if something can go wrong, it will.", others seem to be able to get away with murder and suffer no consequences at all. Luckily, I came across a very interesting article in the London Telegraph about this subject by Richard Wiseman, a researcher who has been studying extremely lucky and very unlucky people for the past ten years. His goal was to find out if it was possible for anybody to become "luckier." Wiseman asked hundreds of people who felt they were either "very lucky" or "very unlucky" to fill out diaries and take part in questionnaires. I. Q. tests and experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their malfortune. First he refers to what is called the "chance opportunity" or "lucky break." We all know that lucky people consistently encounter them, while unlucky people do not. Wiseman performed a test in which he asked both fortunate and unfortunate people to search through a newspaper and find out how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs while the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper!" This message took up half the page and was written in type that was more than five centimetres high. It was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky tended to spot it. For fun, Wiseman apparently placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $700