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