Why are some people more fortunate than others? And what if life is like the Island of Bad Luck? Psychologist Richard Weissman began researching the phenomenon of luck about ten years ago. He set himself an ambitious goal - to determine whether being able to be at the right time in the right place makes a person happier. “After doing a lot of experiments, I finally understood why some people are more successful than others and how to lure luck to themselves,” the researcher says.
He started by placing ads in the largest newspapers for people who consider themselves lucky or, conversely, unlucky in life. The scientist invited them to participate in the experiment.
In total, over the years, he has worked with more than four hundred people. His youngest "client" was an 18-year-old student, the oldest - an 84-year-old retired accountant. The audience came across diverse, but Weissman still classified the most typical cases.
He cites 42-year-old Jessica, a forensic medical examiner, as an example of a lucky man. “I have a job that I have always dreamed of, two wonderful children and a great husband, very beloved by me. When I remember my life, I understand that luck smiled at me almost every day,”says the woman.
Her opposite is a 34-year-old nurse named Caroline, who constantly fails. Within just one week, she managed to injure her ankle, hitting a pothole in the asphalt, then hit her back when falling from a ladder and crash her car into a tree during a driving lesson. No matter how much she fell in love, not a single chosen one reciprocated her. “I get in trouble all the time,” Caroline laments.
Research by Weissman has shown that while people are almost never aware of the specific reasons for their bad luck, their thoughts and actions lead to a series of further failures that grow like a snowball. The trouble with such sufferers is that the experiences of one failure knock them out of the saddle for a while, and during this time they bring on new problems.
To prove this, Weissman gave the volunteers a newspaper and asked them to flip through it and say how many photos were printed on its pages. Losers spent an average of two minutes on it, and lucky ones - a few seconds. The fact is that already on the second page it was written in large letters: “Stop counting. There are 43 photos in this newspaper”.
This message was striking, but the losers missed it, and the lucky ones immediately paid attention. Around the middle of the newspaper, Weissman jokingly posted the following text: “Stop counting. Tell the psychologist that you saw this ad and they will give you £ 250. Losers let him through, too, because they were too busy counting photos.
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Special tests to identify personality traits have shown that people who are haunted by failure are much more stressed and anxious than happy and successful people. This anxiety is constantly distracting and deprives them of the ability to notice things that others can see with ease.
Weisman suggested that the subjects show a suddenly flashing colored dot on the computer screen for a monetary reward. The participants in the experiment focused on the monitor, and one in three of them missed this point, although it was bright and large. The more closely they peered at the screen, the more worried about the result, the worse everything turned out.
The problem with losers, Weisman believes, is that they simply do not notice the lucky chances that fate gives them. Unlucky people are too focused on finding the right solution to their problems, and as a result, they make new problems.
If they fixate on choosing the perfect partner, they miss out on many opportunities to make good friends. They study newspapers, choosing a job for themselves, and completely ignore other ways of finding jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed, so they see reality in a different light and can take a great opportunity that they did not even initially think to find.
Weisman believes that luck consists of four components - the ability to trust your intuition, an optimistic attitude towards life, the ability to look at things from different angles and inner balance, which allows you to carefully and calmly look around.
To understand whether it is possible to make fortune turn to face him, the psychologist opened a kind of "school of luck". A group of volunteers took part in trainings for a month, the main purpose of which was to form their positive thinking. “I wanted to teach them how to feel lucky and see if it helps them become luckier,” explains Weissman.
NATALIA SINITSA