What To Believe

Published: Aug. 4, 2022, 8 a.m.

• There are two popular ideas worth exploring when it comes to the concept of luck: the law of attraction, and the idea of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Research into the effectiveness of the law of attraction (or wishful thinking) yields no support, and indicates that fantasy can actually undermine success by making us less likely to take useful action.

• A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. It proves how powerful belief can be.


• If you believe you are a lucky person, you are more likely to create that reality yourself — not out of thin air, or by magic, but because you are proactively taking steps to make that outcome a reality.


• Robert Wiseman and Alan Kirman have independently discovered that being lucky may come down to believing that you are lucky.


• Lucky people do visualize, yet they tend to imagine not the outcome but the performance of the practical steps needed to reach that outcome. They tend to be positive and optimistic, easily forget past mistakes, trust their gut feelings, and put a positive interpretation on events by imagining how things could have been so much worse. This, in effect, means that people who believe they’re lucky, are!


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