Page 185 - Wake Up and do Your Thing
P. 185
Science and Serendipity
NICHOLAS BOOTHMAN
No-one gets lucky alone. Professor Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire in England, spent eight years researching why some people have more good fortune than others. In his research he and his team found that under the right conditions, eighty percent of the people who tried to increase their luck by talking to strangers were successful, and on average it took only thirty days to improve their luck by forty percent.
One example of his findings is from a study he conducted in 2003, in which he and his team asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their attitudes towards luck and good fortune. They then randomly assigned half of the participants to a "luck- enhancing" group and half to a control group.
The luck-enhancing group was given a series of tasks designed to increase their chance of encountering good fortune, such as carrying a lucky charm, visualizing
185
