I am a Success Story (and you can be too!)

Long before I started working for eHarmony Labs, I was actually convinced by my mother to join eHarmony on a free communication weekend – she told me that she was worried about the quality of men I would meet in a bar, but I also think she feared that I was too closed off to begin with. And she had a point – I wasn’t what you would label, “approachable” in social settings. I went to movies by myself and would “shush” people that tried talking to me; I would wear earphones at the museum and only go to the non-crowded areas; at the local bar, I would gladly accept your free drink and then swiftly walk away. It’s not that I am a complete jerk (not completely), but there had been too many awkward social situations in which I felt trapped and could not leave quickly enough. I was turned off by the thought of putting myself “out there”. By using eHarmony, I knew that at the very least, the people with whom they matched me would have important similarities to my core values (and if I didn’t like them, I could make them go away with a click of the mouse).

I should also mention that when I’m wearing heels, I am well over 6 feet tall. I would close any match shorter than 6 feet without reading a thing about them. One day it was pointed out to me by a friend that the average height of a male is somewhere between 5’8” and 5’10” and that by only selecting people based on height, I am excluding a large proportion of other users. Trying to keep this in mind, I would still close people shorter than 6 feet (what do my perfect-height friends know, anyway?) The third day on the site, I was matched with someone who lived in Brentwood, which was just up the street from my Santa Monica apartment. The catch: he was 5’7”. But he also liked movies and his profile made me laugh out loud, so I wrote him a message clearly stating that even though I was far too tall for him, I would like to be his friend. I think you can see where this is going. Six months later we were living together; it’s been three wonderful years. I am very lucky.

So what changed? He certainly did not get taller, that’s for sure. What happened was that I started to see the bigger picture. I lost focus on the height and my priorities were not so cut-and-dry.

I’m not the only one who has experienced good fortune by changing my outlook; take a look at Steve Jobs. When he was initially fired from Apple, he started Pixar. If J.K. Rowling would have accepted constant rejection, we wouldn’t have Harry Potter. If Jonah hadn’t run away to New York, Tom Hanks would have never met Meg Ryan! These seemingly lucky people were able to make fancy lemonade out of lemons.

This phenomenon is what Richard Wiseman would refer to as the Luck Factor. In a fascinating study, Wiseman worked with people of all walks of life who proclaimed they were either exceptionally “Lucky” or “Unlucky” people. An interesting finding from a component of his study had to do with chance opportunities. Wiseman gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper and told them to look through it and count the number of photographs that were inside. On average, the unlucky group took about 2 minutes to count the pictures, while the lucky group finished in only seconds. Why is that? Because on the second page of the paper, in two inch lettering which took up half the page, there was a message that read, “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Lucky people were more likely to spot the message than unlucky people. This is because the unlucky group was so focused on the main goal that they missed out on a chance opportunity to complete the task much quicker. In other words, the harder they looked, the less they saw.

So where did the greatest difference lie between the two groups? According to Wiseman, unlucky people tended to be much more anxious and tense, which has been shown to disrupt a person’s ability to notice the unexpected. How can we create our own luck? Wiseman has identified four principles that lucky people use to create their own good fortune (from his website, www.richardwiseman.com):

Principle One: Maximise Chance Opportunities
Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.

Principle Two: Listening to Lucky Hunches
Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

Principle Three: Expect Good Fortune
Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.

Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good
Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on ill fortune, and take control of the situation.

By incorporating these principles into our lives, we not only reject the negative, but we embrace the positive, making us more relaxed and open. Though my time on eHarmony was brief, I learned an extremely valuable lesson on keeping an open mind. I was able to see what was there, rather than only what I was looking for, and I couldn’t be happier.

Further Reading:

Wiseman, Richard. The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life, the Four Essential Principles. New York: Miramax/Hyperion, 2003. Print.

Smith, Matthew D., Richard Wiseman, Peter Harris, and Richard Joiner. “On being lucky: the psychology and parapsychology of luck.” European Journal of Parapsychology 12 (1996): 35-43. PsychInfo. Web. 21 Apr. 2011.