Lucky vs Unlucky

I received a very interesting mail sometime back. It was about being lucky and unlucky in the life. If we see around us, there are few people who are considered very lucky. They seem to be doing very well in whatever they do. They are always on right place doing right things.

On contrary, there are few people always complaining about being unlucky. Always blaming on one or another thing. Even if they have done anything wrong, still the blame would be on others. They just try to hide their mistakes. Though, it can't be said for every time but most of the time it is true.

So why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve or they think they do deserve.

There was a experiment done by Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire. He is a psychologist and he claims that he has discovered the answer. I have no idea whether his clam is right or not but it appears to be right to an extent. Here is his study in his own words -

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 experience 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 and over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities,whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a 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. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." 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. Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.
As a result, they miss 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 make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and 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.

My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four 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.
Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.

Dramatic results These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all,
luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky. Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor".

Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:
1) Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.

Luck is very often a self- fulfilling prophecy.

Have a Lucky day and work for it.

Makar Sakranti!!! Some fond memories of childhood!

Happy Makar Sakranti!!!

This festival really has lot to remind me. As a child, it was one of the eagerly waited event of the year. The event when we can spend whole day flying kites even half of the night if parents would allow us. The eve of the Makar Sakranti used to be spent in shopping of kites (of course before that buttering to elders).

One of my uncle used to be a ardent fan of kite flying. So it has made our task a bit easier. He used to buy kites for him in bulk. We used to be happy to see them though they never belonged to us but as a child you can be happy for any reason.

So after the shopping is done, in the night we had to do preparation for next day. That included picking good kites, putting threads in the kite. It's like preparing for a battle. Whole room would be filled with kites, threads and kids with one project manager kind of person (that used to be my uncle). This process used to end up around 2 or 3 in the night.

So here comes the big day, I used to wake up early in the morning around 5 AM and still used to think that I woke up late. As the sun rises, the fun also rises. The only thing you can see in the sky is kites with different colors and different shapes. It is such a fascinating view. Almost each and every person of the city would be on terrace this day and others would be in kitchen preparing something to eat like bhajji, sweets etc. Everybody wants to fly his kite very high till it becomes invisible.

We always tried to cut our neighbor's kite whom we (kids) always treated like Pakistan on this particular day. If we were able to cut their kite, the celebration used to be more than 20-20 win.

Finally, after spending whole day running around and shouting, our parents almost had to drag us down. It used to be such a fun for everybody, even today, people do enjoy it a lot. I really miss those days.