This article on luck is a great post to open the New Year.  Make 2013 your luckiest year yet by following these simple guidelines.

There are people who seem to have been born lucky. They know what they want, set out to get it, and somehow, everything falls into place. Even if something goes wrong along the way, they still manage to land on their feet.

Some people, on the other hand, who just can’t seem to catch a break. These are the people who believe that someday their luck will turn, and that someday, the “lucky ones” will run out of luck too. Some of them will simply blame the stars – they believe they’re fated to be unlucky, and they can’t do anything about it.

In a strange way, the unlucky ones are right, or so says Drawk Kwast. In his article Science of Luck on Small Business CEO Magazine, he explains that “The biggest reason you don’t have the life you want is because you are focused on what you aren’t getting. You see only your lack of luck. Successful people live life as they desire because they focus on what they are getting.”

The unlucky ones are unlucky because they believe they’re unlucky. Makes sense, right?

Drawk shares the results of a study conducted by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. In the study, he asked two groups of people, a “lucky” group and an “unlucky” one, to look through a newspaper and tell him how many photographs were in it. On average, the lucky people had their answers in seconds, while the unlucky ones took two minutes.

Luck is about keeping your eyes open

The lucky ones saw a large message taking up half of the second page that said: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The unlucky ones totally missed it and kept counting.

The key, as Drawk puts it is this: “It’s not about luck. It’s about keeping your eyes open.” He goes on to say that he’s among the lucky ones, “not that I have better luck than other people; it’s that I can see things that others can’t.” Drawk can identify opportunities for growth and success that many others can’t, and he also interacts with as many people as possible to create those opportunities.

Luck is about extending your hand

This idea is shared by other lucky people. One of them is Tom McCarthy, whom was interviewed a few months back for a NOBS TALK on Increasing Your Luck. Tom explains: “One of the things lucky people do that unlucky people tend not to do is they maximize the number of opportunities that come to them.” By being outgoing, by introducing yourself to others, and by expanding your network, you create opportunities for yourself, and improve your luck.

Luck is about listening to your gut

Tom also shares that lucky people listen to their “lucky hunches,” while unlucky ones go against them. If that doesn’t quite make sense, replace “lucky hunches” with gut or intuition. You improve your luck by following your gut – it might not get it 100% right, but more often than not, your intuition will steer you in the right direction, and you’ll be happier for it.

Luck is about keeping a smile on your face

This brings us two the idea that lucky people are happier. The idea seems so obvious – if things just seem to fall in place for you, of course you’ll be happy about that. What most people don’t see, however, is that it works when you flip things around – happy people are luckier too.

J.D. Roth discusses this on Zen Habits in his article How to Make the Most Out of Luck in Your Career and Life. “A person who leads a balanced life is happier, more relaxed, more open to new experiences,” J.D. Explains. “If you maintain good relationships, pursue satisfying hobbies, go out of your way to help others, and continue to pursue personal growth, you will become a well-rounded person, just the sort that ‘luck’ favors.”

Michael Levy also discusses this briefly in his article The Five Principles for Prosperity. The first principle he shares is to Enjoy Everything. Enthusiasm and exploration, he says, “leave the door open for future development.”

Drawk Kwast really sums it up well: “This has nothing to do with luck. It’s pure science.” Luck is all about your attitude and your outlook. It’s about opening your eyes, creating opportunities, following your gut, and maintaining a positive attitude. The question now is this:

Will you create your own luck, or will you be one of those who do nothing but complain?

Photo by billaday www.flickr.com/photos/billselak/2067139101/

Great article on will power and New Year’s resolutions from The Wall Street Journal

Blame It on the Brain:
The latest neuroscience research suggests spreading resolutions out over time is the best approach

By JONAH LEHRER

Aside from how you can use this fascinating information personally, note the last paragraph below.  The more stressful obstacles you put in a character’s way the more likely he or she will succumb to the temptations of the antagonist,  fall into the Trouble Traits (on the Character Map) or start slipping to the Dark Side (on the Character Map).  Here’s an article excerpt:

Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it’s an extremely limited mental resource.

Given its limitations, New Year’s resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the entire year. Human routines are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88% of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. Bad habits are hard to break—and they’re impossible to break if we try to break them all at once.

Some simple tricks can help. The first step is self-awareness: The only way to fix willpower flaws is to know about them. Only then can the right mental muscles get strengthened, making it easier to succeed at our annual ritual of self-improvement.

The brain area largely responsible for willpower, the prefrontal cortex, is located just behind the forehead. While this bit of tissue has greatly expanded during human evolution, it probably hasn’t expanded enough. That’s because the prefrontal cortex has many other things to worry about besides New Year’s resolutions. For instance, scientists have discovered that this chunk of cortex is also in charge of keeping us focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract problems. Asking it to lose weight is often asking it to do one thing too many.

In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.

This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of leftover pizza. (In fact, one study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that just walking down a crowded city street was enough to reduce measures of self-control, as all the stimuli stressed out the cortex.) A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.

There’s something unsettling about this scientific model of willpower. Most of us assume that self-control is largely a character issue, and that we would follow through on our New Year’s resolutions if only we had a bit more discipline. But this research suggests that willpower itself is inherently limited, and that our January promises fail in large part because the brain wasn’t built for success.

Full Wall Street Journal article on will power here

As we look forward to the tremendous shifts and changes this coming year will bring in technology, finance, entertainment and politics let us fully and completely embrace the indomitable and unconquerable force of love in our work.

In my rambles on the web this holiday season, I found the following list of the ways we can and must love as writers and storytellers. I wanted to share it with you. Tack this list up over your computer. May you tell your stories with love this year and write your best self in 2009!

Practice these 11 principles:

l) Love of telling a story–the belief that your vision can be expressed only through story, that characters can be more real than people, that the fictional world is more profound than the concrete.

2) Love of the dramatic– a fascination with the sudden surprises and revelations that bring sea-changes in life.

3) Love of truth– the belief that lies cripple the artist, that every truth in life must be questioned, down to one’s own secret motives; the ability to see and exorcise your own shit and to bring it up courageously and mercilessly.

4) Love of humanity–a willingness to empathize with suffering souls, to crawl inside their skins, and see the world through their eyes.

5) Love of sensation– the desire to indulge in and bring to life the pleasures of the five senses.

6) Love of humor–even the most sober domestic dramas need that light touch, the twist of irony, the bite of satire, or the warm, gentle mirth that makes the most mundane scene glow.

7) Love of language–a delight in sound and sense, syntax and semantics.

8) Love of process–a joy in the journey of the story and the solitude of writing.

9) Love of uniqueness–the thrill of audacity and a stone-faced calm when it is met by ridicule.

10) Love of beauty–the courage and skill to develop your own style.

11) Love of duality, conflict, argumentation and the energy to orchestrate scene dynamics.

Unlike the stories of personal essays, memoirs and autobiographical novels, a screenplay must use and transcend or deepen self into the collective unconscious to create a story with universal appeal. Each person has a life story with endless encyclopedic variations. The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but give us a lifetime.

Excerpted from Julia Keefer’s essay http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/story/story.htm