Stop Trying so Hard to Get Lucky!

For the last of my 10 posts on how to get lucky and increase luckortunity, I am going to tell you to “stop trying so hard to get lucky”. For most things in life you have blinders on and your eye set on the goal to be successful. Luck is very different since it is not one specific thing that you can focus on, it is many things all over the place. Imagine watching a ping pong match while standing around the middle of the table. As the ball goes back and forth, so does your head. You are concentrating hard to follow the ball but in the process you miss out on anything happening that is not around the ball. On the other hand if you back up a little and you just watch the game being played without concentrating so hard, you see the big picture and get a better feeling of what is going on.

Luck is all around us and if you try too hard, you will end up blocking out all the possible luckortunity. Professor Richard Wiseman states that the human brain is very good at finding what it wants. If you are hungry, it will find food, thirsty? It will find a drink. If you are looking for one particular opportunity, it will find that opportunity. The problem is that the opportunity your brain is trying to focus on may not exist and you are stuck without any opportunities. Wiseman conducted extensive research to find out why some people are lucky and why some people are not lucky. In his research, he tested out exactly how focused the human brain can be. He asked people to watch a short film of people playing basketball. 3 people were wearing white t-shirts and 3 people were wearing black t-shirts. Wiseman asked people in the experiment to count how many times the people in the white t-shirts passed the ball. At the end of the experiment he asked “who saw the gorilla?”. During the short film of the people playing basketball, a man in a gorilla suit came into the camera’s view and started to beat his chest, then walked off. Almost everyone in the experiment had no idea what he was talking about until he showed the video again and pointed it out. The people watching the film were so focused on counting how many times the ball was passed between the white t-shirts that they missed the gorilla completely.

In other research of Wiseman’s, as I mentioned on the Luckortunity page, he had people look through a newspaper and count how many pictures were in the entire paper. One of the pictures in the paper was an ad that said, “if you see this, collect £100”. The unlucky people were so focused that they missed the ad completely and just counted it as one of the pictures. The lucky people were not as focused and they were able to see more than just the pictures but also what was in the pictures. There is an old saying when someone is so focused in on a detail that “he can’t see the forest because the trees are in the way”. This is exactly the same situation. When people focus too closely, they miss out on everything around them.

In conclusion to this series of 10 posts on how to get lucky and increase luckortunity, just remember that luck is all around you, you just need to know how to find it. In all the articles I wrote how to put yourself in the situation to become lucky and increase your luckortunity. In the third to last article I wrote about working hard once you are in the situation to make the most of the luckortunity. The last two articles tell you about the mindset that you should have to get lucky. Being optimistic and being open to the big picture free up your mind to welcome all the luckortunity that is floating around you. Remember don’t try too hard because it will cause you to lose focus and miss out on the luckortunity. It reminds me of the quote “don’t take life too seriously, you’ll never get out alive”. I’m not sure who first said it because everywhere I look it is quoted to someone else. The secret to luck is to just do as much as you can, switch things up often and relax.

Previous Posts in this Series: 10 Ways to Increase your Luck.