so these are the principles the different ways in which lucky people think and behave so we have they're open to opportunities and when those opportunities come along they make the most of them and you saw that all the time they're very flexible so they got an end point they knew they wanted to i don't know be successful or you know financially well-off or whatever it was but the way they were going to get there they didn't really know they were looking at the way the wind was blowing and then setting sail to make the most
of that very flexible folks second they tend to trust their intuition and when they get that gut feeling they really do treat it as an alarm bell and take it quite seriously third they're optimists and so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy they they kind of continue in the face of failure and and so on and fourth and i think it's probably the most important principle uh they're extremely resilient so when bad things happen they could bounce back yeah you know i remember i interviewed hundreds of lucky and unlucky people one of them was this guy
that was in the lucky group and he came in for two interviews between the into interviews he'd fallen down the stairs and broken his leg it's the second interview he comes in with his leg and a cast yeah and i say i bet you don't consider yourself quite so lucky now and he says this wonderful answer which still sticks with me he said you're kidding he said you never know the impact of something like this he said sure it's annoying at the moment but he said last time i went to hospital i fell in love
with the nurse there we were happily married 25 years later it was the best thing that ever happened to me he said don't label it bad luck you never know what's going to come from this yeah it says incredibly resilient sort of attitude and so those are the four things the opportunism uh the intuition the optimism and the resilience and and is that something that people can learn or is it does it tend to be a sort of quote innate trait well that's a very good question all of us are a mixture of genes and
the nature of nurture basically and i'm not very interested in the nature end of things i'm not very interested in things that can't change or don't change so i think all of us can make the most of our potential and that's the bit as a social psychologist that fascinates me the challenge is how do you do it how do you do it and when i looked at these self-help books i realized that this stuff wasn't evidence-based people were just making things up some of it might be helpful some of it might not be and so
we started to come up with interventions and test them okay and that was the basis of life factor which which is these things which actually we know make a difference because we've done the the studies to support it hey friends thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this clip then click here for the full unedited episode and if you like that then do please consider subscribing to the channel it means a lot thank you so much and have a great day
