I’m on day 2 of reading The Survivors Club by Ben Sherwood and today I read about lucky versus unlucky people. I’ve always known my husband is one of those “lucky” people – those people for whom everything seems to go right – even when it shouldn’t. The people who can arrive at the airport 10 minutes before their flight leaves, with luggage to check, and still make the flight. Those maddening people who defy logic. The lucky.
Well, it turns out that “lucky” people aren’t blessed by some magic lucky stick at all. There are actually tests to determine whether you exhibit “lucky” behaviors or “unlucky” behaviors. And it boils down to whether you become overly obsessed with focusing on one task or if your world is more open and observant to opportunities that arise. A great video referenced in The Survivors Club that I watched was an experiment about how “lucky” you might be. In it, 3 people in white shirts passed a basketball to others in white shirts and 3 people in black shirts passed a basketball to others in black shirts. Your role is to determine how many times the white shirts passed the ball. The neurotics like me get way into this experiment, shutting out all else except the white shirt passes. This is apparently unlucky behavior. The lucky people, like my husband when I asked him to watch the video, noticed that in the middle of the reel, a gorilla walked through the frame, stopped and pounded his chest, then kept walking. Those unlucky people predominantly didn’t even see the gorilla.
What are the implications for being “lucky” in business? I would gather that a higher proportion of entrepreneurs possess characteristics of being lucky than your average Joe. But isn’t it too true that we can also become myopic and not see anything except our current business challenge? Perhaps it would pay off to remember what it feels like to be lucky and expand our horizons, look up from our work for a few minutes and notice the opportunities that abound around us.
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