Assignment:
Read following passage, at the end, write a short critical essay
A ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. The results also show that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives.
Ten years ago I decided to take a mote scientific investigation into the concept of luck. I decided that the best method was to examine why some people are consistently lucky whilst others encounter little but ill fortune. In short, why some people seem to live charmed lives full of lucky breaks and chance encounters, while others experience one disaster after another.
I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women have volunteered to participate in my research; the youngest eighteen, a student, the oldest eighty-four, a retired accountant. They were drawn from all walks of life--businessmen, factory workers, teachers, housewives, doctors, secretaries, and salespeople. All were kind enough to let me put their lives and minds under the microscope.
Jessica, a forty-two-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky people in the group. She is currently in a long-term relationship with a man who she met completely by chance at a dinner party. In fact, good fortune has helped her achieve many of her lifelong ambitions. As she once explained to me, "I have my dream job, two wonderful children, and a great guy that I love very much. It's amazing, when I look back at my life I realize that I have been lucky in just about every area." In contrast, the unlucky participants have not been so fortunate.
Patricia, twenty-seven, has experienced bad luck throughout much of her life. A few years ago, she started to work as cabin crew for an airline, and quickly gained a reputation as being accident-prone and a bad omen. One of her first flights had to make an unplanned stop-over because some passengers had become drunk and abusive. Another of Patricia's flights was struck by lightning, and just weeks later a third flight was forced to make an emergency landing . Patricia was also convinced that her ill fortune could be transferred to others and so never wished people good luck, because this had caused them to fail important interviews and exams. She is also unlucky in love and has staggered from one broken relationship to the next. Patricia never seems to get any lucky breaks and always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Over the years I have interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, personality questionnaires, and intelligence tests, and invited them to my laboratory to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. Nor are people born lucky or unlucky. Instead, although lucky and unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their fortune.
My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a very simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such 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. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message "Stop counting--There are 43 photographs in this newspaper."
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over 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. Just for fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper. This one announced: "Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $25 0." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense and anxious than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the center of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots. The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the center dot. This time, people were far more anxious about the whole situation. They became very focused on the center dot and over a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.
And so it is with luck--unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to mak e good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
But this is only part of the story when it comes to chance opportunities. Many of my lucky participants went to considerable lengths to introduce variety and change into their lives. Before making an important decision, one lucky participant would constantly alter his route to work. Another person described a special technique that he had developed to force him to meet different types of people. He had noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To help disrupt this routine, and make life more fun, he thinks of a color before he arrives at the party and then chooses to only speak to people wearing that color of clothing at the party! At some parties he only spoke to women in red, at another he chatted exclusively to men in black.
Although it may seem strange, under certain circumstances, this type of behavior will actually increase the amount of chance opportunities in people's lives. Imagine living in the center of a large apple orchard. Each day you have to venture into the orchard and collect a large basket of apples. The first few times it won't matter where you decide to visit. All parts of the orchard will have apples and so you will be able to find them wherever you go.
But as time goes on it will become more and more difficult to find apples in the places that you have visited before. And the more you return to the same locations, the harder it will be to find apples there. But if you decide to always go to parts of the orchard that you have never visited before, or even randomly decide where to go, your chances of finding apples will be dramatically increased. And it is exactly the same with luck. It is easy for people to exhaust the opportunities in their life. Keep on talking to the same people in the same way. Keep taking the same route to and from work. Keep going to the same places on vacation. But new or even random experiences introduce the potential for new opportunities.
Dealing with Bad Luck
But a lucky life is not lust about creating and noticing chance opportunities. Another important principle revolved around the way in which lucky and unlucky people dealt with the ill fortune in their lives. Imagine being chosen to represent your country in the Olympic Games. You compete in the games, do very well, and win a bronze medal. How happy do you think that you would feel? Most of us would, I suspect, be overjoyed and proud of our achievement. Now imagine turning the clock back and competing at the same Olympic Games a second time. This time you do even better and win a silver medal. How happy do you think you would feel now? Most of us think that we would feel happier after winning the silver medal than the bronze. This is not surprising. After all, the medals are a reflection of our performance, and the silver medal indicates a better performance than a bronze medal.
But research suggests that athletes who win bronze models are actually happier than those who win silver medals. And the reason for this has to do with the way in which the athletes think about their performance. The silver medallists focus on the notion that if they had performed slightly better, then they would have perhaps won a gold medal. In contrast, the bronze medallists focus on the thought that if they had performed slightly worse, then they wouldn't have won anything at all. Psychologists refer to our ability to imagine what might have happened, rather than what actually did happen, as "counter-factual."
I wondered whether lucky people might be using counterfactual thinking to soften the emotional impact of the ill fortune that they experienced in their lives. To find out, I decided to present lucky and unlucky people with some unlucky scenarios and see how they reacted. I asked lucky and unlucky people to imagine that they were waiting to be served in a bank. Suddenly, an armed robber enters the bank, fires a shot, and the bullet hits them in the arm.
Would this event be lucky or unlucky? Unlucky people tended to say that this would be enormously unlucky and it would be just their bad luck to be in the bank during the robbery. In contrast, lucky people viewed the scenario as being far luckier, and often spontaneously commented on how the situation could have been far worse. As one lucky participant commented, "It's lucky because you could have been shot in the head--also, you could sell your story to the newspapers and make some money."
The differences between the lucky and unlucky people were striking. Lucky people tend to imagine spontaneously how the bad luck they encounter could have been worse and, in doing so, they feel much better about themselves and their lives. This, in turn, helps keep their expectations about the future high, and, increases the likelihood of them continuing to live a lucky life.