I was keen to discover whether it would be possible to make lucky people even luckier, and so was delighted whenever lucky people agreed to take part in the project.
In Chapters Three and Six I described the lucky life of Joseph, the 35-year-old mature student. When he was younger, Joseph was in con- stant trouble with the police. Then, a chance conversation with a psy- chologist on a train changed his life. The woman was impressed with Joseph's insight into his behaviour, and suggested that he would make an excellent psychologist. Joseph decided to take control, looked into the type of qualifications required and eventually decided to return to college. He also has the ability to turn bad luck into good. In Chapter Six, I described how he softens the emotional impact of any bad luck in his life by taking the 'long view', and noted how he described being sent to prison as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him. When he agreed to take part in Luck School, Joseph was studying for a univer- sity degree in psychology and hoped to graduate and find work as a counsellor.
When we first met to discuss the project, I asked Joseph to complete a Luck Questionnaire and Life Satisfaction Questionnaire. Perhaps not surprisingly, Joseph had a Luck Score of + 5, and was very satisfied with many areas of his life - but would it be possible to make him even luckier?
When I reviewed the techniques that lucky people used to create good fortune in their lives, Joseph quickly realised that he was already
Life in Family life Personal Financial Health Career general life situation
Joseph's scores on the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire before Luck School.
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using many of them, but agreed to make a conscious effort to increase their usage over the coming weeks. In particular, he thought that he might benefit from reducing the impact of bad luck (Principle Four: Sub-principles One, Two, Three and Four). We also discussed how he might increase the number of chance opportunities he encountered in his life (Principle One: Sub-principles One, Two and Three).
One month later I met with Joseph again and he told me what had happened. He started off by describing how he had managed to increase his ability to look on the positive side of ill fortune (Principle Four: Sub-principle One):
A couple of unlucky things happened, and they would have got me down if I hadn't been able to see how some good luck might come out of them. I was a bit like that before, but even more so now. Now, I always find, there is something good that comes out of bad luck, always.
The other day I went home, and my wife told me that I have to talk to my son because he was caught stealing some food from the cafeteria at his school. It's the first time he's ever done anything like this and fortunately he got caught, so now I can reinforce the message that this isn't an avenue to go down. So a bit of bad luck in his case has turned into good luck. It's lucky that he's been caught for it now, because in my case years ago, when I was a naughty boy, I never got caught the first time,
so because I got away with it I thought I was invincible, and carried on.
Last year there was a mature student in my year called Jackie. I didn't know her very well, but knew she'd been diag- nosed with lung cancer and was going through chemotherapy. On Tuesday morning she died. I was sad, but then I thought 'Well, Joseph, perhaps it's a message, you know she was a heavy smoker, you are smoking, and you have been thinking of giving it up. Perhaps this is a good time.' So I'm seriously thinking about giving up smoking and trying to improve my health. Joseph had also managed to greatly increase the number of chance opportunities in his life (Principle One: Sub-principles One, Two and Three):
Lots of my good luck over the past few weeks has centred around opportunities - just small things at first, but they really built up. The other day, I walked past another student. I don't know him very well, but I thought I'd stop and have a chat. I said hello and he asked me how things were going. I told him that I was taking a statistics course, but that my statistics aren't that great, and my lecturer had recommended a certain book, but when I went down to the bookshop I found out it was really expensive. Anyway, this guy said that he had the book and gave it to me for free, because he had already finished the course.
A few weeks ago I was walking back to my car in a car park and I saw a piece of paper on the ground. Normally I would have walked past it, but instead I treated it as an opportunity! I kicked it, just in case it was a lottery ticket, or something like that. Anyway, I kicked at the paper, and there was a £20 note underneath. Then, when I picked it up I realised it was five £20 notes - £100 in cash. It was just lying there.
The big news is that I was head-hunted. I work voluntarily for an organisation that helps people who have learning disabil- ities integrate into the community. Another charity heard about me and they sent me a letter saying we understand the work you're doing and we're offering you a job to go out to people who feel they can live in the community but who have learning difficulties; my job would be to go and assess if that is the case.