Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are1 in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I placed 2in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to3 me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research. Over the years I interviewed them, watched their lives and had them4various experiments.
I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether their differences in5 was due to differences in their ability to6opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to 7 it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had 8placed 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 9 it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Unlucky people are generally more10 than lucky people, and this anxiety affects their ability to notice the 11. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to gatherings focused on finding their perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They read newspapers 12 to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more13and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people create good fortune via four14. They are skilled at creating and 15opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition(直觉），create self-fulfilling prophesies(预言) via positive expectations, and adopt a "never say die" attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
