Toast always lands butter side down. You never win the lottery, but other people you know seem to..were you born unlucky?



A study led by one of Britain"s pre-eminent psychologists Richard Wiseman suggests "The luckiest people in the world are born in May. The unluckiest, or at least the people with the most negative view of their lives, are born in October." Wiseman and his fellow researcher in Sweden, Jayanti Chotai conducted a survey on 40,000 people in Edinburgh International Science Festival.



The results revealed summer born (March to August) were more luckier" than winter born (September to February).The resulting levels of "luckiness" showed an undulating pattern that peaked in May (above 48 %) and lowest in October (43%).



Wiseman explains ,perhaps because babies born in winter enter a harsher environment than summer,they remain closer to care givers and so are less adventurous and lucky in life."Lucky" people consistently pick up "chance opportunities", whereas unlucky people do not.



Explanation of bad luck is mostly psychological and partly mathematical. Wiseman has correctly pointed out



1. Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.



2.Lucky people are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.



From a mathematical standpoint,so called unlucky events are not always independent of each other. The independent probabilities might be small,the chances of both/all of them occurring is ALMOST certainly higher than product of two (or more) probabilities.



Finally Professor Wiseman"s 4 top tips for becoming lucky:



* Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right



* Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine.



* Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well



* Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.





Related Articles

1.BBC :The loser"s guide to getting lucky

2.Richard Wiseman :Philosophy of Luck