In the game Monopoly, there are two types of card-drawing spaces, Chance and Community Chess. Both cards can have positive or negative results, but the Chance cards are far more likely to more a player around the board (i.e. Advance to Go).
I know what you are thinking, another post about board games? This guy must have quite the budding social life. But I am not here to talk about board games. Instead, I am going to revisit another subject I touched on recently.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about counter-factual thinking and how it can help us make our own luck. Luck seems to be a very popular topic. Maybe it is because St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner. Or maybe it is because we all would like to become a little luckier.
Well, you are in luck (get it) because I am back with another way that we all can increase our good fortune.
While doing his ten year study on the nature of luck, Richard Wiseman found that we all hold chance cards are likely to move us in life and help us maximize our opportunities.
In one of his experiment, participants were asked to look through a newspaper to count how many photographs it contained. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photos, but it only took the lucky people a few seconds.
This is because the second page of the newspaper featured a message which said, “STOP COUNTING-THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.” The message took up half the page and was written in very large print. It was almost impossible to miss, but the unlucky people skipped right past it while the lucky ones spotted it right away.
A second large message was included midway through the newspaper. This one said, “STOP COUNTING, TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU HAVE SEEN THIS AND WIN $100.” Again, the unlucky people were too busy looking for photos.
The reason lucky people noticed the messages while unlucky ones did not, has to do with their personality, more importantly, how calm/anxious they are.
In addition to many experiments, Wiseman gave his participants personality tests. His results showed that unlucky people are generally quite tense and anxious. He found lucky participants to be more relaxed.
Research has shown that anxiety disrupts our ability to notice the unexpected. The ability to remain calm and comfortable allowed the lucky folks to spot many opportunities that unlucky people did not.
It is not that lucky people get more chance opportunities. They simply see more. It is as if both lucky and unlucky people land on the Chance card in Monopoly the same amount of times, but the unlucky ones are so focused on trying to buy Boardwalk that they don’t realize they should be picking up a card.
Unlucky people do not see chance opportunities because they are so focused on looking for something else. “They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends, said Wiseman. “Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”
If you want to increase your fortune you need to decrease your fretfulness. You may not always land on the Chance space, but you can improve your ability to act on lucky opportunities by being aware of the entire playing board.
Photo credit: SFWeekly.com
