Why Are Some People Lucky?

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist says he has discovered the answer.

He says…

Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research. Over the years I interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in various experiments.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether their disparity in luck was due to differences in their ability to spot 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. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying…

“Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50.”

This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches 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.

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