Product Description

Why do some people lead happy successful lives whilst others face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? The author identifies four main factors which explained living a lucky and unlucky life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9824 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

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From the Publisher
An revolutionary study of luck, and its power to transform our lives.

About the Author
Professor Richard Wiseman began his working life as a professional magician before obtaining a first class honours degree in Psychology from University College London and a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He now heads a research unit based within the Psychology Department at the University of Hertfordshire. He has featured on hundreds of television science/factual programmes, including Horizon, Equinox, and World in Action. Wiseman has also made regular appearances on BBC1's Tomorrow's World, co-presented BBC1's Carol Vorderman's Out of This World series and was the resident psychologist on the BBC2 series Angus Deayton's Lying Game.

Excerpted from The Luck Factor: A Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind by Richard Wiseman. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lucky people’s lives are full of chance opportunities. In the last chapter I described the life of professional poet Jodie, whose lucky chance encounters have helped her achieve many of her lifelong dreams and ambitions. We also met Lee, a marketing manager who has an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. He met his future wife by chance and puts much of his success in business down to lucky encounters. Then there was serial competition winner Lynne. The entire course of Lynne’s life was altered when, quite by chance, she came across a newspaper article about a woman who had won several prizes in competitions. Lynne, Lee and Jodie were typical of the lucky people involved in my research. Without trying, opportunities just seem to come their way.
Lucky people are often convinced that these opportunities are the result of pure chance. They just happen to open newspapers at the right page, come across the right page on the Internet, walk down the street at the right time or go to a party and meet the right person – but my work revealed that these seemingly chance opportunities are the result of lucky people’s psychological make-up. The way they think and behave makes them far more likely than others to create, notice and upon chance opportunities in their lives. I uncovered hitherto unexplored techniques that lucky people use to maximise the role of seemingly chance opportunities in their lives. I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind.
Wendy is a 40-year-old housewife. She considers herself lucky in many aspects of her life, but is especially fortunate when it comes to winning competitions. On average, she wins about three prizes a week. Some of these prizes are quite small, but many have been substantial. In the last five years she has won large cash prizes and several major holidays abroad. Wendy certainly seems to have a magical ability to win competitions – and she is not the only one. In the previous chapter I described how Lynne has won several large prizes in competitions, including several cars and holidays. The same is also true of Joe. Like both Wendy and Lynne, Joe considers himself to be very lucky in many areas of his life. He has been happily married for forty years and has a loving family. However, Joe is especially lucky in competitions, and his recent successes include winning televisions, a day spent on the set of a well-known television soap opera, and several holidays.
What is behind Lynne, Wendy and Joe’s winning ways? Their secret is surprisingly simple. They all enter a very large number of competitions. Each week, Wendy enters about sixty postal competitions, and about seventy Internet-based competitions. Likewise, both Lynne and Joe enter about fifty competitions a week, and their chances of winning are increased with each and every entry. All three of them were well aware that their lucky winning ways are, in reality, due to the large number of competitions they enter. As Wendy explained, ‘I am a lucky person, but luck is what you make it. I win a lot of competitions and prizes, but I do put a huge amount of effort into it.’ Joe commented:
People always said to me they think I’m very lucky because of the amount of competitions that I win. But then they tell me that they don’t enter many themselves, and I think, ‘Well, if you don’t enter, you have no chance of winning.’ They look at me as being very lucky, but I think you make your own luck … as I say to them ‘You’ve got to be in to win.’
I wondered whether the same idea might also account for the other types of opportunities that lucky people constantly encounter in their lives; whether this could explain why they often meet interesting people at parties and come across newspaper articles that change their lives? I managed to go backstage and discover the reality behind the illusion. And my research revealed that it could all be summed up in just one word – personality.
People who tend to think and behave in the same way are said to have the same personality. The concept of personality is central to modern day psychology, and a huge amount of time and effort has been invested in working out the best way of accurately classifying people’s personality. Although it has often been far from easy, the results have been very impressive.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I MADE THE SWITCH AND WAS ABLE TO LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE RATHER THAN THE DARK SIDE ALL THE TIME. NOW I LOOK AT EVERYTHING AND THINK HOW LUCKY I AM.
MICHELLE PFEIFFER
After years of research, most psychologists agree that there are only five underlying dimensions to our personalities: five dimensions on which we all vary. These dimensions have been found in both the young and old, in men and women and across many different cultures. These dimensions are often referred to as Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism and Openness.

I compared the personalities of lucky and unlucky people on the five dimensions of personality. The first dimension I examined is referred to as ‘Agreeableness’. This is a measure of the degree to which someone is sympathetic towards others and willing to help them. I wondered whether lucky people were the recipients of large amounts of good fortune because they tended to help others, and so others tended to help them in return. Interestingly, lucky people scored no higher on Agreeableness than unlucky people.

Customer Reviews

The Luck Factor is a Remarkable Book
This is an amazing book. It's no ordinary self-help book - it's well-written, presents fascinating results of solid scientific research, and it works - at least it worked for me! It's packed with information about psychology yet it is an easy and compelling read. It describes how the author, who is an academic psychologist, did research that revealed that luck is not about chance or fate, it is down to how you think and behave. You can make your own luck by following four "luck principles". As well as the discovery of the principles, the book describes "luck school" - a scientific study in which people were given various exercises to practise in order to boost their luck by using these four principles. 80% of people reported significant increases in their happiness, life satisfaction, and luckiness, following their participation in the luck school experiment. I must admit I was a bit skeptical before reading the book. I have always considered myself a lucky person, and I didn't think the book would have much effect on me. However, I discovered using the questionnaire in the book that although I was already using three of the luck principles, I was neglecting a fourth one. So in the last week I have been practising the recommended exercises to boost that principle and I am amazed and delighted to say that I have already noticed an increase in my luck! I think this remarkable book deserves to be a bestseller.

A state of mind
This fascinating 10-year study reveals that good fortune is not primarily due to talent, hard work or intelligence. The book is a scientific investigation based upon interviews and experiments with people who consider themselves lucky; the author concludes that luck is a state of mind that may be cultivated.

Wiseman identifies four principles that underlie a life of good fortune, adherence to which will draw good luck into the life of the individual. These are 1. The belief that you are lucky (lucky people create, notice and act upon chance opportunities. They also have a relaxed attitude to life). 2. Lucky people make success happen by using their intuition and gut feelings. 3. One must expect good fortune, hold fast to this belief and persevere in attempting to achieve your goals. 4. Lucky people have a knack for transforming back luck into good luck. One must affirm your good fortune and have a strong conviction that everything will work out for the best.

There are graphs showing the research results and some black and white illustrations of playing cards. Overall the conclusions are quite impressive and I find the results of the study very convincing. There are plenty of exercises and the book concludes with notes that include bibliographic references. It is heartening to finally see scientific proof of the power of the mind in this regard.

unexpectedly interesting
I was given this book and assumed that it would be another rubbishy self-help book. However, to my suprise, I found that it was actually very interesting and convincing. Most of what the author says is commonsense, but I have never seen it all tied together like this before. I think the best thing about this book is that the recommendations for what to do to improve your luck are all quite easy to do, and enjoyable, so it's something that you're more likely to stick to.