How to be luckier

I’ve talked about luck on here before.  Mostly, I think I've expressed my own belief that luck can play a role in a person’s (or writer’s) success, but only to a certain extent.  I think it’s one thing to get a lucky break, but quite another to take that lucky break and make something substantial out of it (let’s just say, I’ve seen plenty of people get “lucky” and land amazing jobs…only to be fired shortly after because they couldn’t handle the responsibilities).

They shoulda had one of these babies!

However you might feel about luck, I don’t think anyone would say they DON'T want to be lucky.  But how can a person "be luckier" (an oxymoron)?  Lifehacker ran an article yesterday called "What Lucky People Do Differently Than Unlucky People" that describes a psychological experiment I recognized immediately because it also appeared in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers a couple years ago (see, I told you to read it already!).  Go ahead and read it again, though.  The experiment involves two groups of people, one that considers themselves "lucky" and one that considers themselves "unlucky."  Each group is asked to count the number of photos in a newspaper.  The lucky group, on average, completes the task in seconds while the unlucky group takes minutes.  This isn't due to the lucky group's superior picture counting skills, but due to the fact that most saw a message on the second page of the paper that said to stop counting and gave them the total number of pictures.

In other words, the lesson appears to be that lucky people catch a break (in this case) because they are more relaxed about the task and not so focused on one narrow thing that they missed a better opportunity.  This is a little hard for me to swallow.  After all, successful people have specific goals and get things done and I worry sometimes that if I don’t stay focused on specific tasks (like finishing a script) that I won’t finish anything.

But, I think there’s a balance to all this.  Like I said before, getting a lucky break and having success after that break aren’t necessarily one in the same.  Maybe it’s best to think about this luck stuff not in terms of tasks you WANT to complete/will be beneficial to you as a writer to complete (like writing your dang script) but tedious tasks you DON’T WANT to complete/don’t make you a better writer (like searching for a job, networking, and counting pictures in a paper).  So maybe the best advice is, be more relaxed in networking situations and don't try so hard to just pass your script along, and you might have the good fortune to make a friend who will help you more than a casual connection.  Or, stay open minded in your job search instead of focusing on one specific job or bust.  Or, just win the lotto already if you’re so lucky, jeesh.