Optimism begets positive things. Time and time again, this theme has come up and I keep reading articles and even hearing of studies where luck becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you expect good things to happen, you tend to act in ways that allow more good things to happen. It’s like a cycle that feeds into itself. This is not to say you can’t be lucky without trying, but to be consistently so I do believe it takes effort on your part to believe it and open yourself to possibilities. In many ways you are creating your own luck just by the way you approach the world. The good thing (for me) is I’ve always considered myself to be lucky, which is probably why I’ve been quite lucky all these years.
One thing that I think is very true about optimistic/lucky people is that they tend to notice things more (which in turn opens the doors of opportunity more). As seen in a 20/20 episode, an experiment showed how people who considered themselves lucky were much more likely to notice stray money on the sidewalk. It’s not that the opportunities aren’t there for “unlucky” people – it’s just that they don’t notice them, or they don’t take action on them.
Awhile ago I experienced something similar: I was walking along in Georgetown when I noticed a girl pass by me almost too fast for me to recognize. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, and we’d have gone about our days none the wiser. However, I did recognize her, though she was halfway down the block by the time I reasoned that I wasn’t just imagining things. I reached out to her online to confirm the sighting and we ended up meeting up for dinner that night. It had been 10 years since we last saw each other, and now here we were running into each other in a city neither of us had lived in before.
I previously wrote about another example from my own life about a time I felt lucky, when really a lot of it had to do with pure optimism that I could get my way and make things work out. Most people will tell you when they win something that they never win anything, which is true enough. I hear this a lot on the radio, and it makes me smile to think of all the things that I’ve won! When I look carefully, pretty much everything I won was because of determination and effort, not luck. So in this way, I’ve created my own luck time and time again. I’m no luckier than anyone else; all you have to do is believe in yourself and pursue your goal.
