The Secret to Success
We Americans have paradoxical ideas when it comes to the role of luck.
In some ways, we’re more drawn to luck than many cultures—we love to gamble, for example. Maybe it’s a by-product of our optimistic nature.
Yet we also prefer to think of our successes as the result of hard work and savvy. (Think about the whole ‘up by the bootstraps’ paradigm.)
Excluding a few honest individuals, we don’t readily admit that luck plays large a role in our achievements. Perhaps it is because we don’t like the idea of our future being beholden to random events. Or because we prefer to think it was our dazzling performance that caused the big breakthrough.
We lionize the successful, but not for their luck. We read autobiographies by well-healed CEOs and search for clues that we can apply to our lives. We don’t read books by the random bloke who won Powerball. The CEO and the bloke were both lucky—the difference is that the CEO has developed an appealing (and self-serving) tale that downplays the luck part and emphasizes the ‘and then I did this awesome thing’ part.
If you accept the idea that success is largely predicated on random fortune, then what should you do? Wait for luck to strike?
As it happens, research suggests that people who believe they are lucky are more likely to benefit from the unexpected—meaning they are more likely to be lucky. If you think you will be lucky in the future, you will be lucky in the future.
If successful people share another trait, in addition to being fortunate, it is their ability to notice when they are presented with an opportunity. If people like Steve Jobs and Jack Welch deserve any credit—and they do—it’s for being able to see potential when potential rears its head.
According to British academic Richard Wiseman, an expert in the study of luck, those who see themselves as unlucky usually have more anxiety—and that anxiety clouds their vision. The eternally unlucky wouldn’t notice opportunity if it weighed 400 pounds, wore a red cape and arrived on a horse.
The good news is that luck is probably more evenly distributed than we think. What isn’t evenly distributed is the ability to spot it.
But fear not! Wiseman has these tips to improve your skills at spotting opportunity:
● Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
● Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
● Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
● Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.
● Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy
In closing, I'll leave you with a classic example of being blind to opportunity:
Comments
Hmm, have to think about all this, which is what a good blog does, I guess.
I like the tips about making yourself open to lucky breaks but I'm worried though. I hate hate hate to gamble on anything. And it does sort of seem like then I'm pessimistic about the how lucky I am.
Posted by: lori | September 12, 2007 05:29 PM