7 posts tagged “life”
Be Lucky Easy Skill
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html
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Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn
Those who think they're unlucky should change their outlook and discover how to generate good fortune, says Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman
Published: 12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003
A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.
To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.
Related Articles
*
The luck of the Irish - and the Welsh
*
1 December 1998: Luck runs out for 'atomic' gambler
Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."
In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.
Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.
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.
For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.
The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.
And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. 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.
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.
I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen 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 dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.
In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:
* 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.
Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His book, The Luck Factor (Century), is available for £9.99 + £1.99 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
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*Luck on Life Study
paste
Be Lucky Easy Skill
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html
Paste
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html
Accessibility links
* Skip to article
* Skip to navigation
Digital Publisher of the Year | Tuesday 13 October 2009 | Technology feed
Log in | Register now
Advertisement
Website of the Telegraph Media Group with breaking news, sport, business, latest UK and world news. Content from the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers and video from Telegraph TV.
Enhanced by Google
* Home
* News
* Sport
* Finance
* Lifestyle
* Comment
* Travel
* Culture
* Technology
* Fashion
* Jobs
* Dating
* Games
* Offers
* Technology News
* Technology Reviews
* Technology Topics
* Technology Advice
* Video Games
* Blogs
* Technology Video
1. Home
2.
Technology
Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn
Those who think they're unlucky should change their outlook and discover how to generate good fortune, says Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman
Published: 12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003
A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.
To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.
Related Articles
*
The luck of the Irish - and the Welsh
*
1 December 1998: Luck runs out for 'atomic' gambler
Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."
In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.
Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.
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.
For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.
The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.
And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. 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.
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.
I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen 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 dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.
In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:
* 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.
Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. His book, The Luck Factor (Century), is available for £9.99 + £1.99 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.
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A Life of Lost Blogs
I have had a gabit of writing-diaries, page after page of random thoughts, and exploring my mind through my thoughts.
I am because I think. I have thoughts therefore I exist. Life is random string of thoughts, meandering through time, I am serching or a timeless or immortal life.
Great ideas miss me. Logic defies me. Reason shuns me.
Hope is a mirage. Mind is s shadow of the invisible. The man, mind,body and spirit , which defines abd identifies me although, immortal, timeless and forever do not represent me. I am bryond recognition. Unseen I exist, Identifird I die.
Good Life is only but a dream. Never a reality, it is non existent.
45 Years of Diary Writing ; New perspectives on Diary's Re-reading
I opened the pack of diaries in the plastic bag stiring all
my diaries from March 1964.
Life has a strange view of looking at you as a culprit. It
holds you responsible for the missed opportunities in life, these increase with age.
It also judges you on the basis of your responses to
offers of friendships, networking, and becoming a leader of men.
I have committed many blunders, in this regard. I never
met CMD, as I was appointed th CC of NIDC.
I never talked to my colleagues, or team members, and least of all to my department ream.
This failure of communication was the cause of my professional disaster in life.
I was proud of my intelligence, thought everyone wanted to see me to get ideas.
20,6 Morning Blog : Roof Top in Morning
Life has to be lived every day. The morning
reminds us, the sun encourages us, and the
wind, a cool breeze, gives us to live and enjoy
life to the full.
I went to the roof top and a fresh air, invigorating
and peodding us to action. A sense of wellbeing
filled me, giving an inner force of health, life, and
jife forever young.
This is going to be the blueprint of the day today.
http://www.vox.com/compose/
A Night of Blogging : ON LIFE and TIMES of AKLAL2007
Can one Blog cover the Life and Times od a person?
It is not about History or Tinelines.
It is abouy Life, Ideas, and the essence of an individual, his ideas, lesson's of Life, and the mind behind life.
Wandering in the corridors if lofe, meeting people, visiting places, and experoencing lofe in the raw.
A good blog is about food writing, recording life as it is. Going beneath the surface, to find the real lofe, real peoplem and cisiting real places.
We have a tendency to divide life into stagesm into professions, and creating artificial catrgories, to coverup oir ignorancem and insist on making profound statements, where yhere is no depth, or understandubg,
Life is not abput people, places, or journeys or adventuresm it is aboit discoering meaning abd truth.
Clearly, we miss the real poinr of life when we indulge on meaningless discussions on trivial matters like money, dyayus, education and our place in the socoety.
An essay pn meaning of life, ots pirpose, and our conclusions, will be more omportant than all the diariesm autobiofraphies, and life stories, becaise they only deal eiyh the orrelevent self, and not the person within, or the life as experienced by an indibidual.
A good life yoelds a good story, and a promise to write only the truth and the facts is bound to generate great life story and create a masterpiece of od literature.
We all live under the sadow of greatnessm wauting to be duscovered by oneself or by a mentor.
Lide story is a collection of these short stories of lifem combining to foem a drear story of ab individual representing the good, and telling the story of his life by esample.
Blog Life @ Crossroads
Blogging
It started as a game in diaries.
Posting on rhe Web. Day after day,
Soon it took over, daily blogs.
Then, everyone started blogging, and it became an addiction.
Today, it is a medium of communicatuon, keeping in touch with yourself and the world.
What else cab I do?
People use it to promote products, themselves, and keeping ahead ib this fast changing world.
A set of blogs has been converted into a book. It is used to introduce yourself on an interview,
Creativity, demands new applications.
I think of lists of lists, an autobiography as a series of lists,
Changing phone directory over time,
The cross section of life in terms of people moving in and out of your life.
A list of life's lessons, great ideas, and life as seen through cities visited, rivers crissed, and mountains climbed, deserts travelled through, and forests through which you have found way through.
Even a web history, or your reading list
can bring out the hidden aspects of your life.
Combining all these will create, a profile, which wull surprise you, and your friends.
Do we really change? Progress in life? or think or do new things, from day ti day?
This is the backdrop of life as we live it from day to day or minute to minute.
To catch all of this in a blog is the challenge.
Blog Life @ Crossroads
Blogging
It started as a game in diaries.
Posting on rhe Web. Day after day,
Soon it took over, daily blogs.
Then, everyone started blogging, and it became an addiction.
Today, it is a medium of communicatuon, keeping in touch with yourself and the world.
What else cab I do?
People use it to promote products, themselves, and keeping ahead ib this fast changing world.
A set of blogs has been converted into a book. It is used to introduce yourself on an interview,
Creativity, demands new applications.
I think of lists of lists, an autobiography as a series of lists,
Changing phone directory over time,
The cross section of life in terms of people moving in and out of your life.
A list of life's lessons, great ideas, and life as seen through cities visited, rivers crissed, and mountains climbed, deserts travelled through, and forests through which you have found way through.
Even a web history, or your reading list
can bring out the hidden aspects of your life.
Combining all these will create, a profile, which wull surprise you, and your friends.
Do we really change? Progress in life? or think or do new things, from day ti day?
This is the backdrop of life as we live it from day to day or minute to minute.
To catch all of this in a blog is the challenge.
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
