I read that the first 3 days of March are considered unlucky? They called them the blind days. No one would plant, enter into an agreement, or a journey during these days. I am not sure if this is true or untrue.
But it got me thinking - is luck real? Are some of us lucky and some of us unlucky?
Luck by definition is success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. This chance is a force that causes good or bad things to happen.
Are some things lucky like rabbit foot and a four leaf clover, and some things unlucky like black cats and Fridays that fall on the 13th?
The argument for March as being unlucky could be substantiated by the fact it also houses the Ides of March where Julius Caesar had a bit of a bullying incident and all of his closest colleagues ganged up on him and killed him. That wasn’t terribly lucky for him.
So maybe there is something to luck and superstition (whether it happens in March or not).
Richard Wiseman spent ten years studying the nature of luck. And he found that mindset plays a huge role and to a large extent people make their own good and bad fortune. He spoke to 400 people who identified themselves as “lucky” or “unlucky” and found that those who continually had good luck professionally and personally responded to situations in a similar way.
Turns out you can make you own luck and here’s how.
Leap at opportunities.
Create opportunities and notice the chance for opportunities.
You see we tend to seek out the same. It is easy, comfortable, and doesn’t take too much thinking. And this is made even worse when we are stressed or anxious because then we re-wire our brain to not notice the unexpected. We tune in for survival and miss the opportunities of creation and luck. Plus we have an innate aversion to risk wired into our DNA - we focus more on loss and danger than on what we have to gain. So we stick in the safe, secure but miserable situations rather than unfamiliarity.
But then we can exhaust the opportunities in our life - same things done every day, same people we always network with, same job, same holidays, same thing for breakfast - same things create the same outcomes.
But if we seek out and create new experiences, if we seek variety and new or random experiences, then we create potential for new opportunities.
Taking brave action.
Listen to your intuition.
Trust your gut.
We really can over analyse, thinking about every outcome and every scenario. Left brained logical thinking over intuition and your instinct every time. But this can lower your odds of actually making a good or lucky decision because it takes a lot of time.
Wiseman found lucky people rely on their intuition and act on their instincts. They make quick decisions, trusting their gut and then this makes them more likely to take action which in turn leads them to new opportunities.
So don’t ignore that hunch or gut feeling. Your brain picks up on more subtle and more complex information than we can ever imagine that go beyond our conscious understanding. And lucky people act on these instincts.
Be an optimists. Expect Good Things To Happen
Find something positive in adversity. Find the opportunity.
In Wiseman’s research, lucky people found something positive about an “unlucky” situation. They believed that any setback for one person is an opportunity for another and it all comes down to how you interpret it.
They looked for opportunity in adversity.
In one experiment, he asked people to imagine a scenario where they are waiting in a bank when an armed robber enters the bank, fires a shot, and the bullet hits them in the arm. He then asked ”Is this event lucky or unlucky?
Unlucky people thought they were enormously unlucky and it was just their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. Lucky people often commented on how the situation could have been far worse…like they could have been shot in the head!
Lucky people create self fulfilling prophecies via positive experience. Now whilst this may be called a bit “woo woo crunch granola”, people who expect good things to happen to them attract good things. What you put out you attract back. Where your focus goes your energy flows.
Your beliefs about your future have a way of making it happen. Maybe focusing on what luck you have and creating more luck will make it happen….
Be resilient.
Bounce back and keep trying.
Lucky people can transform bad luck into good. They have a resilient attitude and just bounce back even when things don’t go their way.
No-one is lucky all the time. Everyone has had a parade rained on. But lucky people don’t let bad luck stop them. They persist even when they don’t succeed. Plus combined with their optimism they keep their expectations high which continue to create opportunity and the likelihood of them living their lucky life.
So luck is not magical.
It represents a potential for change and therefore it is not elusive.
It does not involve rainbows, unicorns and some glitter.
It involves a mindset that accepts bad luck as inevitable but finds good luck in taking brave action and embracing new opportunities, trusting intuition, expecting good things will happen and bouncing back when things are not quite going your way.
By definition luck may be based on chance. But your actions and mindset can create luck.
So next time you need some luck, just go and make some.