"I consider myself a lucky person, and though I know my outlook plays a large role in my luck, I don’t think it’s all about optimism. I think it’s more about being free of mind and not having too many attachments.
I know quite a few people who always seem to get the short end of the stick, and one thing they seem to have in common is a kind of irrational clinging to things that are important to them. They might be clinging to favorite foods, to ideas about themselves or the world at large, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that they’re tying their fates in with some thought or inanimate object, which has no will of its own and cannot in and of itself affect any positive or negative changes in their lives. When conditions favor the objects of their devotion, they get “lucky,” and when they don’t, they become “unlucky.” Because there is no organized force behind any of it, they find themselves gaining half, losing half, gaining half, losing half, ad nauseum, until they’re left with very little save a very bitter outlook on life."
This comment by Dan Paz was in response to an article about a study, The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind.
snip
Professor Wiseman executed a ten-year study to determine the nature of luck, and published his findings in a book called The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind. Among other things, he experimentally studied the lottery winnings from people who count themselves as “lucky” and compared them to those who are self-described as “unlucky,” and found that one’s perception of their own luck before a lottery has no bearing on their likelihood of winning. Naturally this outcome was no surprise, because lotteries are driven purely by random chance. But in another test, the good professor asked participants to count the number of photographs in a sample newspaper, and subjects who has described themselves as “lucky” were much more likely to notice a message on page two, disguised as a half-page advertisement with large block letters: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.
Obviously some measure of luck is based on chance, but this experiment and many others have led Wiseman to conclude that a significant portion of one’s good fortune is not random, but rather due to one’s state of mind and behaviors. He concludes that luck is an artifact of psychology, where a person is lucky not because of cosmic accidents, but because one achieves a particular mindset which precipitates and amplifies “lucky” events. While this observation may seem obvious, there are many interesting particulars in his findings.
Professor Wiseman’s newspaper test illustrated that people who feel lucky do indeed differ from those who do not, but not due to to some outside force. The lucky individuals were paying more attention to their surroundings, which made them more likely to notice the message in the newspaper. During his long study on the nature of luck, he has found that “lucky” individuals usually posses many intersecting qualities, including extroverted personalities, a lack of anxiety, open-mindedness, and optimism. Each of these play an important role in one’s luck production.
Read more at
http://www.damninteresting.com/you-make-your-own-luck
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