Why do some people get all the luck while others
never get the breaks they deserve?

A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.

I placed advertisements in national newspapers
asking for people who felt consistently lucky or
unlucky to contact me. Hundreds of extraordinary
men and women volunteered for my research and,
over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored
their lives and had them take part in experiments.

The results reveal that although these people have
almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their
thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of
their good and bad fortune.

Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities.
Lucky people consistently encounter such
opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether
this was due to differences in their ability to spot such
opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a
newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell
me how many photographs were inside.

I had secretly placed a large message halfway through
the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have
seen this and win £250."

This message took up half of the page and was written
in type that was more than two inches high. It was
staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky
people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to
spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky
people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice
the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are
too focused on looking for something else. They go to
parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so
miss opportunities to make good friends. They look
through newspapers determined to find certain types of
job advertisements and miss other types of jobs. Lucky
people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see
what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research eventually revealed that lucky people
generate good fortune via four principles.

1) They are skilled at creating and noticing chance
opportunities,

2) make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition,

3) create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive
expectations, and

4) adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck
into good.

Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these
principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a
group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out
exercises designed to help them think and behave like
a lucky person.

Dramatic results These exercises helped them spot
chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect
to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described
what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of
people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives
and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the
unlucky had become lucky. Finally, I had found the
elusive "luck factor."

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming
lucky:

* Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right.

* Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal
routine.

* Spend a few moments each day remembering things
that went well.

* Visualise yourself being lucky before an important
meeting or telephone call.

Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor
cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is
bloody, but unbowed."

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