Feeling Lucky?
Bob Etherington on what the self-help gurus are missing J
ust about every successful business executive admits that at some point ‘luck’ played a large part in their success. But are these ‘lucky devils’ blessed with a
guardian angel available to only a few or is luck a learnable, controllable skill? Recent studies indicate that attitude and the application of some simple daily behaviors can have a remarkable effect on your likelihood of getting lucky –quickly
I watched a TV programme in the UK recently in which two groups of people were taken to a London Casino to play roulette. One group consisted of people with a generally optimistic outlook and the other with a more pessimistic tendency. As their playing commenced the mathematically random nature of the roulette wheel set about rapidly changing the financial fortunes of the two groups. Intermittent interviews with the players in both teams, as play progressed, confirmed the continuing positive and negative outlooks of the two groups. Unsurprisingly, as the camera’s watched, one group actually started winning quite a sizeable sum whilst nothing went well for the other group. The interesting point was that it was the pessimists who were winning and the optimists who were losing. Yet despite all this, the outlooks of the two sides remained unchanged. The ‘winning’ pessimists who were interviewed said they knew that any moment they would revert to their usual loser status. On the other hand the optimists maintained that, provided they kept playing, they would soon start to win. ‘So nothing new here’, you may say, ‘that’s the business we’re in - thank goodness’.
The missing step.
And yet various market studies and academic research show that, outside the realms of chance and simple mathematics, ‘success’ is not as ‘random’ as it may first appear.
In fact with the addition of some simple activities into 46
your daily life, you are practically guaranteed to see a measurable increase in your lucky breaks. Reading some of the recently published cult books like ‘The Cosmic Ordering Service’ or ‘The Secret’ you might be forgiven for thinking that all you have to do to ‘attract’ remarkable good fortune into your life is ‘think’ about it. Simple! But of course most people who try the ‘thinking’ model alone are doomed to be disappointed. And yet in these and other self help books lie the very seeds of enormous personal good fortune. Several years ago one of the large global copying machine companies identified that the most important predictor of success, when they were interviewing for sales roles was ‘attitude’. More recently another British TV programme (“Are You Tough Enough?”- BBC TV) offered members of the public the chance to take a full ‘SAS’ training course ending in the Malayan jungle. Week by week in extremely tough conditions, the volunteers were eliminated as the training demands of this British ‘army elite’ took their toll. Finally out of 2000 starters in the Welsh hills there were only four people left in the jungle: three men and one woman. They were then judged by a team of four genuine ‘operation’ hardened SAS officers who had observed the entire training programme. Their objective was to identify the ‘one’ who had the potential to become a real SAS team member. Without hesitation they all chose the woman. She hadn’t been the fastest, tallest,fittest nor even the best educated. They chose her, they said, because of her ‘attitude’. Their long experience showed once again that, ‘when the chips are down’, ‘attitude’ alone was the most valuable success asset when times get tough.
In business, ‘attitude’ is just as important. But what drives it and how can any of us rev-up our attitude to become the success we should be?
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