Submitted by Gideon Aedrini on
There are rules of luck: it is not all chance with the wise: it can be assisted by care. Some content themselves with placing themselves confidently at the gate of Fortune, waiting till she opens it. Others do better, and press forward and profit by their clever boldness, reaching the goddess and winning her favour on the wings of their virtue and valour.
– Balthasar Gracian
Just what is it that begets personal luck? We usually think of luck as random, and if it happens to us it’s just the whim of fate. Could it be we make our own luck, and much of it isn’t random at all? Is there something about a person that makes them more fortunate than the next? Lady Luck can be elusive at the best of times, but are events we ascribe to ‘destiny’ any different from just being tuned into the ‘right moment’? Would ‘believing in luck’, even, have beneficial effects?
It is clear to me that there are some people who never need to be told ‘how to’ operate the Law of Attraction. There’s ‘something’ about a certain kind of person who goes through life expecting the best. As if they just ‘know’ Lady Luck is on their side. They seem to take most things for granted, and the infuriating thing (for us) is that their luck tends to hold. Their innate faith in themselves does the job nicely. We’ll find out their secret later on.
Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler of Cologne University produced a paper in 2010 called ‘Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance.’ In it they argue that superstition has a powerful influence on physical and mental abilities, specifically, that tests ‘show that activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., “break a leg,” keeping one’s fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games.’1
In an experiment, twenty-eight students tried ten times to sink a golf ball. If they were told the ball they were using was ‘lucky’, they performed better than those using an ‘ordinary’ ball. If they were allowed to keep a talisman they’d brought, performance in tasks was better than those who weren’t. Finally, they were asked to attempt anagram problems, and the results were the same – those who kept their tokens of luck did better than those who didn’t.
It’s clear enough that personal belief is operating here: some hidden factor is assisting performance and efficacy for those with faith in a ‘lucky’ object. As Alex Lickerman, M.D. says, ‘these results invoke the intriguing possibility that any belief, whether true or not … may be a powerful psychological lever we can pull to access forces within ourselves that actually affect our ability to achieve what we want — even if our belief is incorrect.’ That is: ‘Should we pursue the truth even if it may mean forfeiting not just a comforting notion but a notion that may help us succeed in life?’2
The great American psychologist William James would have answered ‘no’: if believing in luck (no matter how irrational) works for you, why fix something that isn’t broken?
Can You Improve Your Luck?
In my work as a consultant astrologer, I’ve also met people whose lives seem to flow unerringly towards their chosen goal – they seem to be ‘born lucky’. (And yes, there are indications of this potential on their astrological birth charts – but that’s all it is: potential.) They have successful love lives, fulfilling careers, good friendships. They never seem to have a run of bad luck and are rarely on the losing side. I’m thinking of a particular one right now – let’s call him Robin – a computer systems analyst who first came to me for advice on a career matter. You’d say he’s blessed with more than his fair share of luck. (Even if he hasn’t won the lottery, yet.)
More often than not, however, he’s been right about his hunches, and they’ve paid off handsomely! He told me he once moved jobs ‘on a whim’ a fortnight before even the management knew the company would be subsumed by a parent organisation. Within eight months, the original firm had been run down, its employees made redundant. Intuition? Luck?
But what is Robin’s attitude if things go wrong? Here is what he says:
‘Sure I have setbacks and get disappointed, but don’t we all? In any case, something will turn up to put things right. Your luck is bound to change sooner or later.’
‘So life is a kind of lottery?’, I asked.
‘Sure.’
To some, these words might show a reckless laissez faire towards the business of living. Putting faith in something as nebulous as ‘luck’ makes life highly insecure, and yet, the number of occasions it has served him is astounding. Even where luck fails, something often comes along (if only at the eleventh hour) to save him. Take the time when, staying late at work, Robin blithely assumed the janitor was still around in the five-storey office block. However, on this wintry night, the janitor had presumed the building empty, set the alarm, locked the offices and gone home. (Naturally, the main door to the outside was locked too.) However, being trapped was the least of Robin’s worries – the burglar alarm, activated by motion sensor, was about to go off with its deafening screech. Robin was in for a noisy evening.
He’d been in a basement kitchen making tea when, opening the door on to a corridor, Robin realised with horror that the sensor was alive. Another movement was going to make all hell break loose. (The alarm system wasn’t even set to notify any outside agent.) When it went off, he’d be stranded in a secure building with its ear piercing torment. Remember, all the ‘phones were behind locked doors, and this was in the days before everyone had mobiles. Ten minutes of this hell passed when he was aware of a huge draught of air, and he ran upstairs to see the main doors open. Luckily, the area manager (Dave) had received an unexpected phone call that obliged him to return to his office. The call was from a friend he’d last seen ten years ago. But it meant Dave would unwittingly rescue Robin by returning. It was as if Dave’s friend had some other purpose, and I have it from the horse’s mouth that this is a typical event in Robin’s life. Remember his attitude to life: ‘something will turn up to put things right.’
He seems to believe, even, that life is there to provide for him. Take the time when he found a sodden fifty pound note stuck to a tyre in a rainy car park on the same day he’d just lost a bet on a horse. ‘The Lord taketh and the Lord returneth’ was his response. Who else among us, I wondered, would have such luck? When I remarked to Robin that he seemed to treat life like a game to be played, he just smiled: ‘Yes, but it isn’t the winning that’s important, James.’ He then added that if you’re going to gamble, you should never worry about the outcome. I asked if he thought there was something about him, as opposed to mere chance, that made the events (at least the important ones) in his life seem so lucky.
‘I dunno,’ was his reply, ‘but I sort of always know when to make a certain move. And about 99% percent of the time, I’m right.’
Robin’s overall take on life is ‘come what may’ but this is combined with a daring and spontaneity I rarely see elsewhere. He’s full of energy and zest, and you may have guessed that he’s fun to be with. The important thing is that his focus is on life’s ‘bigger picture’ – on the unknown future – even when staying with what he knows and erring on the side of caution seems more sensible. His looking at life’s larger canvas gives him a sense of its wider possibilities and meaning. The more he does this, the more intuitive he becomes – it’s as if he can ‘read’ a situation based on pure instinct. What others might see as mad risk-taking, he sees as being guided to do the right thing! It’s as if he takes good luck for granted. Now that’s faith for you!
In summary, with Robin it’s not simply a case of taking things for granted. That doesn’t make Robin lucky. It’s something a little deeper. Something like trust. Trust is a kind of ‘letting go’ – you have relinquished control over life, simply because you know there are situations that we simply cannot always be in charge of (and control freaks are life’s worriers, too; a negative state guaranteed to drive away luck). So don’t think of it as just ‘trusting to luck’, but another kind of belief – belief in something much more powerful. That there are silent forces helping you if you only believe it! This is because Life gives back what we put into it, and it’s just the same with our psychology, our feelings and intentions. And our beliefs. The more we trust, the more life vindicates us.
I end this post with an apt quote from inspirational author Emmet Fox:
‘There is no such thing as luck. Nothing ever happens by chance. Everything, good or bad, that comes into your life is there as the result of unvarying, inescapable law. [But] as long as you go on thinking wrongly about yourself and about life, the same sort of difficulties will continue to harass you, For every seed must inevitably bring forth after its own kind, and thought is the seed of destiny.’3
James Lynn Page
http://www.astro.nu/2017/02/10/improve-luck/
1. Lickerman, Alex, M.D.,‘How to leverage belief to affect outcome’ – Psychology Today website. (Published on June 10, 2012.)
2. ibid.
3. Fox, Emmet, Power Through Constructive Thinking, New York: Harper and Row, 1940.