I should be so lucky!

Do you consider yourself lucky or unlucky? Have you ever missed out on a job or new client and blamed it on bad luck? I should probably declare now that I don’t believe in luck. As Thomas Jefferson said “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” I have always wondered how so many people I know will ignore hard work, endless optimism and looking beyond the obvious and instead blame their fortunes (or misfortunes) on luck.

Renowned psychologist Richard Wiseman recently found that lucky people are blessed not by good fortune per se, but by a sense of possibility.  Wiseman surveyed a number of people and, through a series of questionnaires and interviews, determined which of them considered themselves “lucky” or “unlucky”. He then performed an intriguing experiment: He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.

How could the “lucky” people do this? The answer is simple – they found a message on page two that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” So why didn’t the unlucky people see it? The problem was that they were so intent on counting all the photographs that they missed the message.

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

By passing positive experiences off as luck surely we are all underselling ourselves and the work we carry out. And, by explaining negative situations as bad luck we are not being accountable for the errors we have made.

So maybe next time, when you don’t win that new business pitch or miss out on promotion, you might not blame it on being unlucky, but instead wonder if you missed the obvious signs on page two.