Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are 1 in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I 2 notices in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my 3. Over the years I interviewed them, watched their lives and had them 4 various experiments.
I carried out a simple 5 to discover whether their differences in luck was due to differences in their ability to 6 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 7 placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50."
This 8 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 more 10 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 look through newspapers 12 to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.
Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there 13 just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people create good fortune via four 14. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition (直觉), create self-fulfilling prophesies (预官) via positive expectations, and adopt a "never say die" attitude that 15 bad luck into good.
