Luck
YOU COULD BE SO LUCKY
(c) David Astle
You may get lucky this week – finding treasure at a market stall or a cab on a rainy afternoon. You may bump into your soul mate at the next step class, or step on $50 in the street. Then again, you may cop the only wonky trolley at the supermarket or wear a pigeon’s splash.
Good or bad luck – the force is with you. But can the right mindset control such a power? Sounds better than a scratchie prize, doesn’t it? That’s what Richard Wiseman believes. For the last eight years this psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK has been exploring luck, chancing on some fascinating results.
Important to this story, luck and chance are seen as close relations yet not the same animal. Luck, says the Macquarie Dictionary, is the good and bad that happens to a person “as if by chance”.
No matter how lucky you feel, you can never will your lucky numbers to emerge from the Lotto blender. Or psyche dice into landing on sixes. These events belong to chance. Short of buying every ticket in the pub’s meat raffle, there’s no way a winning mood can guarantee a single pork chop.
To prove the point, Wiseman ventured to Skibbereen in West Ireland. This humble harbour town is hailed as the UK’s luckiest locale, the locals winning over ten jackpots in the national lottery recently. In the spirit of possibility, Wiseman, an ex-magician, shelled out for 50 tickets – and won nothing. “It suggests the probability theory is still with us,” he laughs, poorer but wiser.
Luck on the other hand is a different scenario. How often have you heard friends credit luck with major turning points in their lives? ? We met by accident. He was in the right place at the right time. She fell into her job. I stumbled across this idea…
For such a life-shaper, luck seems a tricky thing to articulate, let alone capture. When Wiseman, 39, began his experiments, he admitted to skepticism. “I thought the differences between lucky and unlucky people would be shown to be delusional.”
More than 400 people, from fortunate to jinxed, arrived at his Hertfordshire lab to test their luck. Ages ranged from 18 to 84. Some, such as Stephen, a 54-year-old publisher, had experienced bankruptcy, unemployment and heart attack. (While his only lottery win was a false alarm due to a printing error.) Others claimed they had the habit of landing on their feet, no matter what life dished up. So do we deserve the luck we get?
Psychobabble, says most of academia. Wiseman adds, “We rarely had a scientist walking through our doors, describing himself as lucky – or unlucky. The reason for that is [scientists] tend to be logical and not attribute any life-pattern to luck.”
Dr Mike Smithson, a specialist in decision science (studying the pathways to optimal outcomes) at Australian National University, admits a growing curiosity in the L-word. “While luck is not a focus of my research, it’s there around the edges. It’s always benchmarked against probability.”
Yet it seems the ground is shifting. Luck is now being viewed as an integral part of self-perception, and hence a large factor in which decisions we make. “Luck,” wrote playwright Tennessee Williams, “is believing you’re lucky.” And Wiseman is quick to agree.
Studying his guinea pigs, the professor detected a shared set of principles among the luckier subjects. Asking each person to keep a Luck Diary – where you jot down 10 lucky things that happen per day – Wiseman was able to isolate four emerging credos. The first was making the most of your opportunities.
Look no further than the newspaper experiment. Wiseman gave each person a paper, asking them to tally the number of photos inside. For the most part, unlucky subjects took two minutes to complete the task. While almost all volunteers who deemed themselves lucky saw the half-page ad on Page 2 reading “Stop counting. There are 43 photos in this newspaper.”
If that wasn’t enough, a second ad lay deeper in the paper, its massive font reading, “TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU HAVE SEEN THIS AND WIN £100 [about $235].” Again, every unlucky soul missed the message, their focus too fixed to look beyond their chore – and an opportunity was missed.
Harry Coover, a Kodak chemist, seized his opportunity. In 1955 he was asked to develop gun-sight lenses. Alas his fingers kept sticking to his polymer blend. Thus by “luck”, Harry discovered superglue. Yet serendipity is not just the fluke of bumping into something, but the will to look – and the imagination to adapt or implement what you find. Quoting Roman philosopher Seneca via Oprah Winfrey: “Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”
The same applies to mixing at a party. Obsessed by one goal, the unlucky single will rate a social event as sub par if he or she fails to spot their ideal other in the room, while the luckier single will be alive to other tangents, with other outcomes. A dozen chats can open as many doors.
“The weird thing about all these self-help books,” says Wiseman, “is how goal-focused they are: know what you want and how to get it.” So why is his book, The Luck Factor, any different? Because lucky people think differently, he argues. “They have no goal in mind. A lucky person fires an arrow in the air, and where it lands they draw a target. ‘Ooh look’, they say, ‘another bullseye.’”
To that end, lucky people tend to be more flexible in their thinking, more gregarious in their habits. Strange food, new people, different places: the lucky person isn’t scared by a break from routine. Quite the opposite, they thrive on the change, and find benefit as a result. The so-called ‘right place’ is seldom the ‘same place’.
Lucky people will also heed intuition – the second principle. Hunches are seen as the handrails of a lucky life. Wiseman learnt that 90 per cent of his lucky ducks trusted intuition when it came to personal relationships, while 80 per cent said it played a vital role in career choices. Rather than ignoring logic or emotion, the lucky person is confident enough to add that ‘inner voice’ to their decision-making toolkit.
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein observed firemen and nurses for several years across the States. His focus was their knack for making smart decisions in volatile situations – some seeming almost fluky (or flaky) in hindsight.
The secret went beyond experience. “Ultimately it’s all about perception and recognition,” he tells a Fast Company reporter. Klein studied intensive-care nurses in Miami, all of whom “just knew” when a newborn was at lethal risk of sepsis, despite the fact the symptoms and visual cues are profoundly subtle – and the time to act negligible. “We can’t articulate what we see,” said one nurse, “or how we see it.” But luckily they do.
Optimism is another key to having cookies crumble your way, says Wiseman’s findings. While all 400 volunteers – lucky or not – experienced setbacks in their lives, the lucky dealt with them best.
Lucky people operate as though a fortune teller has forecast a fruitful week and the prophecy is fulfilled by virtue of their positive outlook. Imagine a blind date with one guy who’s been gushingly commended by a mate versus one you’ve been warned about. Body language alone will predetermine outcome – just as unlucky people behave as thought the outcome is etched in stone.
As fuel, optimism ensures genuine resilience, the one habit Wiseman adopted from the lucky brigade. “A stubborn person goes against the flow. Whereas lucky people will continue with something but if it doesn’t feel right, they’ll drop it and try something else, until the moment is right to try again.”
Language alone can infer the unlucky mindset. “Unlucky people often use words like ‘always’, like ‘this always happens to me’” observes Wiseman. “Or ‘Every time I go to the supermarket I get the slow queue.’ There’s an absoluteness built into their language which is a mark of their inflexibility.”
The last lucky principle brings us to a stolen suitcase. When working as a magician, Wiseman once lost his entire bag of tricks in an American diner. “I quickly had to think about changing my complete performance,” he recalls. With barely a day to spare, he bought two packs of cards and returned to his hotel.
“That night I found out the true meaning of the saying ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’ I worked into the early hours, figuring out new tricks using the materials I had at hand.”
The desperation worked. The Englishman took to the Hollywood stage with a brand-new routine. “And the two tricks I’d invented were later awarded prizes for their originality.” A stroke of bad luck became a breakthrough. As if by magic – or luck – Wiseman had turned a personal loss into a far-reaching gain.
While destiny deals some lousy hands to lucky people, they are lucky enough to adapt. Take Doug Wills, 53, a Melbourne engineer. The poor bloke has been involved in 11 road accidents, including being on a loaded bus plummeting down a mountain at Falls Creek in 1977 – yet not one calamity has been his fault.
“I look at these incidents,” he says, “and think they could happen to anyone. I’d have to say I’ve been lucky coming out of them unscathed.”
And thanks to an inborn optimism, most of Doug’s bingles carry a silver lining, including a head-on collision in Brighton. “I was waiting at a stop-sign and this bloke came from the opposite direction, clipped a truck and knocked straight into me.”
While his Hillman Minx was trashed, he walked away intact. And the repair job fixed the car’s radiator troubles. Meantime a newly lopsided headlight “helped me pick out street numbers at night-time.” Even if that house number is 13, a man like Doug counts himself among the lucky.
[Sunday Life, August, 2007]