How to be Lucky: Habits of Lucky People!
By Anubhav Srivastava ( Register for his Workshop – Build Super Confidence For Super Success!)
Wondering how to be lucky? Do you want to know the habits of lucky people? Luck is traditionally defined as something that just tends to happen and is not under your control. With the traditional definition of luck, whether something good happens to your or bad, it is all either a wild coincidence or a predestined event from the cosmos. It is considered to be something that you cannot influence. After all if you can directly influence something, it is no longer luck, right?
Now there are many things that do just seem to fall into place for the better or worse. For example, if you are born in a first world country to billionaire parents, it is your dumb luck. You did not influence your good fortune. If you are born in a village in a third world country where even finding healthy drinking water is difficult, it is something you had no control over.
There are going to be tons of things in life that you will have absolutely no control over, if you fall ill with a disease despite having good healthy habits and taking all the necessary precautions, it is bad luck. If despite being non talented, you get a job in some company, thanks to your father’s connections alone, it is your good luck.
So right at the outset, I am not going to be arrogant enough to presume that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, whether good or bad. A lot of good things or bad things that happen are simply not under your control and you should thus adopt a healthy attitude towards failure.
However, that being said, the assumption that luck is never under your control is BLATANTLY FALSE.
If is luck is defined as the odds of something good or bad happening, then barring exceptional situations such as who you were born to, your actions can improve or worsen the odds of something happening. PERIOD. You can become lucky or unlucky through your actions and habits.
By studying hard for your exam repeatedly and for a long duration, you improve the odds of knowing the answers to the questions that will come up in the exam, consequently you improve the chances of being lucky by passing or even acing the exam!
By neglecting your health, not exercising, binge eating, excessively consuming alchohol or smoking, you are doing repetitive damage to your body. By damaging you body you are making it more susceptible to diseases and thus improving your odds of ending up with a serious health condition. In other words, you are making yourself unlucky through your actions!
Thus it is clear that you can’t simply give up on personal responsibility and say, hey it’s all luck, what’s going to happen will happen, so I might as well stop trying. That attitude is a recipe for failure and being unlucky. Your habits are going to play a huge role in the kind of luck you attract in life! So let’s begin with the habits of lucky people that you should adopt.
Lucky Habit 1 ) Don’t wait for Good Luck
The problem with the idea of waiting for good luck to happen to you is that idea of waiting is passive. These are the kinds of people who if stranded on an island would wait for a ship to come and rescue them, which may or may not happen. In fact it may never happen and these people will end up dying one by one.
On the other hand someone with a strong survival instinct will take matters into their own hand. They will ensure they are doing whatever it takes to survive on the island with whatever little resources they have, meanwhile they also build a raft help them sail out or set up an SOS signal of sorts that can be spotted by airplanes and helicopters, thus IMPROVING their chances of being rescued. In other words, they don’t for good luck to happen. They do whatever it takes repeatedly to CONSCIOUSLY attract good luck
The same applies to your work or whatever you want to do in life. You won’t magically become fit overnight, no genie is going to pop out of a lamp to make you that way. You won’t magically get a promotion at your job. You will have to take sustained action to do the things that then IMPROVE the chances of you getting what you want and that is how you attract good luck. So stop waiting and start sailing. Don’t waste your time complaining about whether things are fair or unfair.
Lucky Habit 2) Think before you act
Many people, especially those who end up having financial difficulties or health problems brought on by their bad habits are often impulsive in nature. They have a hard time practicing self discipline. They act on their instincts without thinking much of the consequences. Which is why they are prone to destructive habits which may seem pleasurable now but will create problems later.
For example a compulsive gambler is likely to keep gambling without knowing when to stop. This puts him at a serious risk for gambling until he becomes a financial ruin. Even if he makes a lot of money otherwise he will still end up as a financial ruin. This result will then be attributed by him to bad luck. After all nobody wants to take responsibility for failure 🙂
The same is true for someone who does not exercise, eats all the cholesterol and triglycerides laden foods for twenty years and then finally blames bad genes or bad luck when he starts developing health problems or gains a lot of weight.
Your habits may not completely control your luck but they will surely improve or worsen your chances of something good or bad happening.
Lucky Habit 3) Don’t think waaaaaay too much.
Think before you leap, but don’t think too much or you will never leap. There are two categories of unlucky people, the first category that doesn’t think at all before doing something and the other one that thinks so much that they end up not doing anything at all. In the process they let go of opportunities and possibilities that come to them everyday that could literally change the course of their life.
Opportunity keeps knocking on their door but they refuse to answer, they cover their ears pretending it is not there or think it is n intruder. Finally when the opportunity gets tired of knocking on their door and knocks on someone else’s house and the other guy welcome it in, they cry over their bad luck and say the other guy got lucky!
So don’t act without thinking but don’t think so much that you refuse to act. Action trumps everything
Lucky Habit 4) Do not repeat your mistakes.
If you fail once through a mistake, it is not your fault but if you fail again because of the same mistake it definitely is. Unlucky people tend to keep repeating their mistakes. They just never seem to learn. They stumble again and again not over different obstacles but the same obstacle.
Some people just cant save money, they end up making bad decisions and then lose it. Then when they finally get some money again, they make a bad decision yet again. A person I knew led a habit of being broke half the time and then spending lavishly when he finally got some money. No wonder he became broke again and again.
Some people can’t stick around at their job, and so they think everyone at the workplace is against them. That maybe true once or twice but if everywhere you go, you are attracting the same problems again and again, it is likely that you are making the same mistakes again and again. If you are rude with people and continue to be rude even after getting fired from the first job, don’t be surprised if you are fired again from the next one or the one after that.
Some people keep having the same unhealthy habits despite repetitively being told by doctors to avoid them even after having had a major health scare, when they develop the problem again, they whine and cry and exclaim, “Unlucky me!” Well if the problem was brought about by you not learning from your mistakes, then instead of saying Unlucky me, exclaim “Stupid me!.”
If you want to attract bad luck, it’s simple. Keep making the same mistakes again and again!
Lucky Habit 5) Be calm and reasonably optimistic
Lucky people see the good even in bad situations so they are able to find ways to handle it well.
Unlucky people see the bad even in good situations so they end up making a good situation bad through their own actions.
Most people panic when in a difficult situation. They become so paralyzed with fear, panic, doubt or anger that they become overwhelmed. They are thus not able to see the simple solutions that could otherwise solve the problem.
Lucky people are able to maintain their calm even in tough situations and can therefore think sensibly in order to come up with a solution that can solve the problem. A lucky person will think quickly while maintaining a calm demeanor and save himself and others from a bad situation.
An unlucky person on the other hand will over complicate a simple situation. They might get into a huge argument or scuffle over a minor situation. With their arguments and aggression they may then make the situation even worse, which may lead to bad things happening. Finally when something bad actually happens as a result of their action, they are going to cry and call themselves unlucky.
If you want to be lucky, be calm and optimistic as far as possible.
Lucky people also realize that being reasonably optimistic does not mean you lose touch with reality. Positive thinking can be a bad idea at times. Reasonably optimistic simply means that you understand the facts of the situation and then do what is under your control to improve the situation. It does not mean being delusional or taking excessive risks hoping everything will magically workout!
Lucky Habit 6) Do Not Give Up
The single most important element of success which is under YOUR control is the habit of persistence. Most of the times whenever you set a goal for yourself, things are rarely going to work out in your favor immediately. The larger the goal, the bigger the chances there for failure, at least initially.
History is filled with stories of people who had to face tremendous odds before they finally tasted success. Most of these people would have been dismissed as unlucky after failing over and over and over again.
What if Einstein had given up when his teachers told him he was mentally disabled.
Imagine if Edison had given up when reporters told him he should quit as he had failed thousands of times at trying to create the light bulb.
What if Oprah had given up when a producer told her her face was not good enough for television.
What if Sylvester Stallone had given up when agents told him he would never make it because his partially paralyzed face and slurred speech would make people think he was mentally disabled.
Shouldn’t these people have just given up and called themselves unlucky? After all they obviously didn’t seem to have what it took to succeed. They could conveniently use the excuse of bad luck and everyone would agree that they failed because they never had a chance anyway.
And yet they didn’t, they kept moving on. They kept pushing on. If you have the heart to never give up, eventually a day will come that the stroke of luck that kept running away from you will itself give up and be forced to turn in your favor.
If you want to be lucky, DO NOT give up. Read More on this in the article The Number One Way To Be Lucky !
Conclusion
I hope you loved this article and it has given you some great tips on the habits you need to practice if you want to improve your luck. As mentioned before, this article is not judgmental and I do believe sometimes events happen that are truly not under our control. But there are a sizeable percentage of events that can be controlled to a significant degree through our actions! If you want to be lucky, start practicing the right actions and very soon you will see that you will start attracting the right luck as well!
About the Author
The writer of this article, Anubhav Srivastava is an author, motivational speaker and the director of Carve Your Destiny, a first of its kind inspirational documentary featuring some of the most famous personalities from diverse fields, who teach the viewers how they too can make all of their dreams come true. The movie itself has been seen on Youtube by close to 800,000 people. Anubhav has also been featured in numerous International and India Media outlets such as BBC , The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Rediff.com, Leicester Mercury and many others.
If you have a motivation related problem you wish to solve in your personal life or in your organization, you can get in touch with Anubhav for one on one consulting or a motivational workshop at your organization. For queries please email anubhav101@gmail.com . Facebook: http://facebook.com/anubhav981
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