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My brother emailed me a fascinating article about Being Lucky. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, spent the last ten years researching what makes one person lucky and someone else unlucky.

It is a really fascinating and relatively short article worth reading. Basically, he discovered that…

Many people who feel unlucky are creatures of habit and are so focused on a result that they fail to see everything else floating around them.

Opportunities are in abundance, but when you are singularly focused on one specific opportunity, you will miss the lucky breaks.

He ran an experiment where he had people, both from the lucky group and unlucky group search through a Newspaper and count how many pictures were in it.

He writes, “I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.”

There you have it. If you want to be lucky you need to open yourself up for randomness and variety and taking in the sites around you, not just the specific one you want to achieve.

Some people go to conferences or parties and as Richard writes, “They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

There are other elements to this strategy, but there is one that I find fascinating.

As you know, I wrote up about my strategy for overcoming shyness at conferences and networking events.

This coming week I will be in New York at two of my favorite conferences. Affiliate Summit East and LeadsCon.

This time around my goal is not to just meet people, or meet certain people but to introduce an element of randomness into who I meet. Basically, I will choose a color and approach anyone wearing that color at the conference. I will likely use this “Be Lucky” article as the ice breaker, and see what type of serendipitous connections I make. You never know!

If you want to be lucky too, here are the three takeaway Richard mentions at the end of his post. (Where I stole the color strategy from).

Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

Good Luck