Yesterday, I found myself rather confused about luck. If you were to read yesterday’s post, you could smell the confusion even before you started. If you haven’t read it yet, this was the video that started my struggle to make sense of the term “luck”:

Lucky for me, I finally found my answers in an interview done 5 years ago with Dr Richard Wiseman, head of a psychology research department at the University of Hertfordshire in England.

What I find rather amazing (and amusing) is that he and the Perrott-Warrick Research Unit took 8 years to study what makes some people lucky and others not. However ridiculous that may sound, the findings are rather astounding.

The Overview

We’ll start off by discovering if you’re a lucky person. Then we’ll look at some case studies and finally we’ll discover the 4 things both of us can do now to turn ourselves into really lucky people! ;)

The Definition

Yesterday, I defined luck as a statistically improbable event. However, after reading the interview I realised my definition was actually describing “chance”. So, if you’re thinking about that one lucky draw you won years ago, I wouldn’t bet on you being lucky.

So, a lucky person is defined as someone who has more than his fair share of these “chances” occuring in his life. Quite simple right? Interestingly enough, this is not always the case.

In the interview, Wiseman said:

Subjects would say, “I’m the luckiest person alive” — and they’d come up with dreadful stories. They’d have the same life events as the unlucky person, but they’d look at them entirely differently.

So does that mean the person’s not really lucky? That’s a more tricky question to answer than you think. In order to answer that, we have to look at…

The Unlucky Lucky Person

“We had a subject named Carolyn. When she would come to the unit to be interviewed, it would be just this whole string of bad-luck stories: “I can’t find anyone. I’m unlucky in love. When I did find someone, the guy fell off his motorbike. The next blind date broke his nose. We were supposed to get married, and the church burned down.”

But to every single interview, she’d bring along her two kids. They were 6 and 7 years old — very healthy, very happy kids who’d sit there and play. And it was interesting, because most people would love to have two kids like that, but that wasn’t part of her world, because she was unlucky in her mind.”

Now this is starting to turn into one of those “positive thinking” things isn’t it? Well, yes and no.

“Yes” because Wiseman has concluded from his years of research that lucky people are lucky not because they have lucky things happen to them but how they look and think about the events that take place in their lives.

“No” because the moment you start thinking of yourself as lucky even if tragedy befalls you, guess what? You start to act in a totally different way then if you were to think of yourself as an unlucky person.

Let me try to give you an example. Let’s say I’m going on with my daily life and then something bad happens. Maybe, I lose my wallet. I got a bit upset and then I’m moving on with life again and BAM! I lose my handphone. Now, I’m starting to think I’ve been jinxed, I’m unlucky.

Now, say an opportunity comes along that could potentially change my life. Tony Robbins has noticed my blog and he wants me to join him on stage when he comes to Singapore in 2009 (I can dream, can’t I? I’m visualising!)

If I were to keep that mindset that I’m an unlucky person, then wouldn’t you think I would decline that invitation? You must be thinking,”SaiF, you’re crazy! It’s Tony Robbins!” Well I’d probably answer you with an,”EXACTLY! Just imagine.. with the bad luck I’ve been having, I might start stuttering and die of anxiety on that stage before I even step on it!”

But if I were to admonish that mindset and replace it with an “I’m the luckiest person alive mindset” I would see that the opportunity itself is a lucky event. Now that I’m so lucky, I’ll go out and go on talk shows, radio shows, the papers and since I’m on a lucky streak here, who knows? I might become a popular motivational speaker even before Tony arrives!

Are you starting to see the amazing things this powerful mindset can do to your life? If you’re like me, you probably want to know how to think like this. So, let’s get down to it. According to Dr Richard Wiseman, the 4 principles below will bring alot of good fortune into your life:

1. Maximize Chance Opportunities

This first principle might be a bit more familiar than you think if you’ve read my book. But before I tell you from which part in my book I want to tell you the experiment he did.

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That’s it. Luck wasn’t on their minds, just some silly task.

They’d go through, and after about three pages, there’d be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert — I mean, we’re talking big — that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU’VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, “There are 43 photos. That’s what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?” We’d say, “Yeah, carry on.”

They’d flip some more and say, “Do I get my 150 pounds?” Most of the unlucky people didn’t notice.

So, have you figured out which of the 5 steps from my book that’s linked to? If you said the fifth, then you’ve just won yourself a trip to Hawaii.

When I said that did you respond like how the lucky people in the above case study did by asking “Do I get my tickets?” If you did, great! If you didn’t, great because I have something to tell you.

In my book, I talked about how our Reticular Activating System (RAS) works. The RAS is somewhat of a filtering system in our brain. It will only point out to us what we’re looking for and what we’re consistently thinking about.

That’s why in the 21 Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires, Brian Tracy said something to the effect of “Successful people are not successful because of how they think but because of what they think about consistently in their minds.”

Likewise, lucky people tell their minds and RAS to be open to new experiences and opportunities. You see, I personally find that to be one of the keys to success - to be willing to take up opportunities (and the risks behind it) and act upon them.

The most amazing discovery I’ve made in the whole interview stems from one simple idea. Listen, if you don’t remember anything from this post, remember this. Successful people find an endless stream of fortune because they open their eyes to see them The truth is that there’s an abundant supply of opportunities out there, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before.

Lucky people become lucky because :

1. They are skilled at spotting opportunities around them. They adopt a relaxed attitude to life and open their eyes.
2. They are skilled at creating opportunities for themselves. They are coming from a place of abundance and hence they tap into the Creative force to yield something for themselves.
3. They are skilled at acting upon these “chance” opportunities. They take action!

2. Listen To Your Lucky Hunches

Have you ever got stuck on a Multiple-Choiced Question(MCQ) in school because you don’t know which one of the two is the correct one? I know I’ve had more than my fair share of those moments. Here’s what I’ve got to say about them:

In Primary School, when I studied real hard I would know straight away which of the two is the answer. I’d take my lucky hunch and I’d get it right.

In Secondary School, when I wasn’t really studying that hard I would not know straight away which of the two is the answer. I’d take my lucky hunch and I get it right half of the time.

In Junior College, when I studied quite hard there were no more MCQ questions. ( lol I got you there didn’t I?)

So what’s the difference between my lucky hunches in Primary and Secondary School? Knowledge.

You see, although I’ve been told our brains are like Libraries where they store books and documents according to categories and folders, my obsessive research with the mind has told me otherwise.

Our minds are more like networks with thousands of neuro-connections all over the place. Which neuron connects to which neuron is determined by how we link a unit of knowledge to another. Over time, these neuro-connections become a wide network with almost every neurons being linked to another in some way - assuming you have gathered a lot of knowledge of course.

As a result, we are outstandingly good at detecting patterns. Even though the conscious mind might not see the pattern, the subconscious mind does and that is what I believe results in hunches.

Lucky people become lucky by:

1. Listening to their hunches and gut feelings.
2. Enhancing their intuitive capabilities by clearing their minds of irrelevant and self-defeating thoughts.

By self defeating thoughts, I’m talking about thoughts that sound something like,”I don’t know why you even bother.. you’re gonna fail anways.”

I’ve written on some of these techniques like the Ho’oponopono method, the Sedona Method I talked about in my book. Recently, I even found a video that I now personally use for my meditation. You can get it here.

3. Expect Good Fortune

Expectation is powerful. That’s really an understatement because I have used this technique personally, over and over again simply because it works. For instance, this blog itself is a product of expectation. I actually wrote a post 14 days pre-launch in which I talked about how I already launched the blog before I even did.

And guess what? In that 14 days, I finished my 71 paged book and set up the website with a few posts and got my very first readers. You can read that “expectation post” here.

As Dr Wiseman has intelligently noted,”Over time, that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.”

4. Turn Bad Luck To Good Luck

Today, I do this unconsciously all the time. However, there was a point in time when I didn’t. Whenever I failed a test, I would wallow in self-pity for days. Today, if I fail a test, I think “Hey! At least I still have time to pass the big examination.”

In fact this kind of thinking got me an A for my ‘A’ Level Mathematics exam when I’ve been getting F’s all the time throughout Junior College. If I had gotten an E, it would have been an accomplishment but instead, I made a choice to turn my run of bad luck into good luck.

I thought to myself,”Saif, now that you know all the ways how to fail an exam, I guess that leaves us with the only way to pass an exam” and pass I did - and outstandingly at that! ;)

Lucky people are lucky even though tragedy may befall them because they spontaneously:

1. Imagine how things could have been worse.
2. They don’t dwell on the ill fortune.
3. And they take control of the situation.

If you’re like me, you probably asked yourself, “Isn’t that just being self-delusional?”

Wiseman answers like the wise man he is,”What’s so delusional about that? If it keeps you going in the face of adversity and softens the impact… I think that’s fine. It would be delusional if you took it to the extreme — especially if you weren’t learning from your mistakes.”

I’d like to end by leaving you with this quote,”Successful people are lucky because they don’t depend for it.” However, over the course of this post, I’m sure you’d agree with me that it wouldn’t hurt to apply the four above mentioned techniques ;)

P.S. I realise after all this research that Anthony Robbins was right when he said,”Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I guess that would teach me not to ever, ever, ever doubt the man who changed my life eh?

Talk To Me:

A friend told me today that my comments box was broken, which explains why there have been 0 comments for the past week or so. It’s truly a shocking discovery! Now that I’ve got that out of the way…

I want to know what you think of this article my friend? I also feel like injecting some fun into this blog. What has been the luckiest moment in your life?

What’s next?

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