The Secret of Luck: Why Some People Have All the Luck
Why do some people have all the luck while others are perpetually unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire was determined to get to the scientific bottom of the phenomenon of luck, and what he discovered may surprise you:
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, have been interviewed by me. I have 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 behaviour 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 $50′.
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.
Link | Richard Wiseman’s official website | His book: The Luck Factor
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The Outrageous (Mis)Fortune of Terry Gilliam
Anyone who’s ever seen the heartbreaking documentary Lost in La Mancha knows that esteeemed filmmaker Terry Gilliam does not have fortune on his side when he’s making films. But what might be less familiar to people is that his bad luck has followed him almost since the beginning of his career. According to film blog Cineleet:
No director in history knows more about compromise than Terry Gilliam. Part and parcel of being a visionary is being constantly told you can’t get the shot. Forces of Darkness conspire to defeat you, often in the form of studio executives, sometimes in the form of Nature herself.
Right now, they have a great post documenting many of the challenges Gilliam has faced, from 1977’s Jabberwocky all the way through next year’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which was dramatically affected by the tragic death of Heath Ledger (Ledger was slated to portrayed one of the film’s main characters). I can’t imagine the fortitude it takes for a man like Gilliam, who’s suffered countless setbacks, to keep pressing forward. I’d like to think that the visions he has for his movies prevent him from stopping.
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