I’m currently reading The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. In it, Shawn talks about a study done by Richard Wiseman on how luck affects our lives. Wiseman conducted a study that went something like this.

He asked participants to look through a newspaper and count the number of images in the paper. Simple right? The people that had already deemed themselves as “unlucky” took around 2 minutes to complete the task. But, the people that had deemed themselves as “lucky” took only a few seconds.

In the paper where the participants were counting the images, on the second page, there was a big red notice that said: “Stop counting, there are 43 images in this paper.” Then, on the next page, there was another notice that read the same and even offered to give the participant money if they stopped right then and told the host of the experiment.

The “lucky” people tended to see the notices and stop counting, completing the task early, while the “unlucky” people missed the notices all together and laboriously finished counting the images manually. So, it stands to reason that luck is less about random chance and more about the ability of a person to notice an opportunity that someone else has missed and then act on it.

luck is less about random chance and more about the ability of a person to notice an opportunity that someone else has missed Click To Tweet

If you want to be luckier, simply adopting the mindset that you are “lucky” may have more of an impact than you think.

HT: Here is an article in Inc. about the research.

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash