Is luck just fate, or can you change it?

A new scientific study by psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman about the phenomenon of luck reveals the ways in which we can bring good luck into our lives. But, what is luck? A psychic gift or a matter of intelligence? And what is it that lucky people have that unlucky people lack?  This research put luck under the microscope for the first time, examining the many ways in which both lucky and unlucky people think and behave. After three years of thorough interviews and tests with over 400 volunteers, Wiseman reached an astonishing conclusion: Luck is something that can be learned. It can be experienced if the Four Essential Principlesare followed: 

• Creating Chance Opportunities: Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.
• Thinking Lucky: Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.
• Feeling Lucky: Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and hunches. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind.
• Denying Fate: Lucky people use various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on ill fortune, and take control of the situation.

Dr Wiseman and his team wanted to show whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, he decided to create a “luck school” – a simple experiment that examined whether luck can be enhanced by getting people to think and behave like a lucky person.

A group of lucky and unlucky volunteers was asked to spend a month carrying out exercises conceived to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them pinpoint chance opportunities, pay attention 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 astonishing: 80 per cent of people were happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky.