Create Your Own Luck

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” ~ Seneca, Roman philosopher

“Bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets reality.” ~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Israeli business management guru

Who should listen: If you’re suffering from a streak of bad luck and need to turn your fortunes around or you’re envious of people who always seem to be in the right place at the right time, then you’ll be interested in what science says about how to create your own good fortune.

Key idea: There are 4 skills everyone can develop that work together to create opportunities for success.

Action item: Read The Power of Positive Thinking, and then spend a few minutes each day putting yourself into a positive frame of mind.

Today’s Silver Dollar episode isn’t for those who feel unlucky in love. (That’s another podcast. 😉)

Instead, it’s for business owners who are tired of missed opportunities, swear that others always seem to have better luck than they do, and want to be the masters of their own destinies.

This episode is about how you can make your own luck and the 4 habits that a scientific study reveals you can develop to create your own good fortune.

The Luck Factor

Dr. Richard Wiseman is the only professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in England. In his book The Luck Factor, he documents the results of a 10-year study in which he claims that good and bad luck are the results of habits that can be measured. Specifically, he concluded that people who have good luck are skilled at 4 habits:

1. They create and notice chance opportunities. Luckier people tend to be observant and outgoing and, as a result, they find themselves in a greater variety of different situations where they can have chance encounters. Any of these encounters might produce a good opportunity.
2. They listen to their intuition. The sum total of your experiences forms a subconscious record of past details and patterns. When lucky people “listen to their gut,” they’re recognizing similar details and patterns in their present circumstances that enable them to take or avoid actions as they’ve done in the past.
3. They have positive expectations that come to fruition. In this instance, people who expect things to work in their favor are likely to expend more effort to attain their goals.
4. They adopt a resilient attitude. Not only do lucky people put a positive spin on unfortunate events (the proverbial silver lining) but they also tend to find opportunities in those events.

We explain Dr. Wiseman’s findings in more detail with examples, plus we talk about how developing these 4 habits in your own life—and especially with regard to your business or career—can help you to create your own luck.

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Connect | Resources

The Luck Factor by Dr. Richard Wiseman

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

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