Options and Liberty

by Brian Klemmer

Here’s a novel thought: All people have freedom. What about those who live under a dictator? They, too, have freedom. Why? Because it’s the ability to choose, and all human beings have that, as Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl has so eloquently described, even in unimaginable circumstances. However, the consequences of their choices are far different than average circumstances. And even though all people have freedom, very few enjoy liberty.

Liberty is the ability to do what you want to do when you want to do it, to go where you want to go when you want to go there. Most important, it’s the ability to be what you want to be when you want to be it.

Compassionate samurai search for choices, solutions, and meaning in life, rather than waiting for them to appear. They try to increase the liberty that they and others enjoy. They don’t shrink from tough choices simply because they don’t like the perceived outcomes.

I believe that of all the gifts God grants us, the most powerful is choice. It’s also a very useful tool if used skillfully. It has a power that gives us the potential winner’s edge all of the time. It’s the ability to create liberty. That might sound like an unrealistic philosophy, but it isn’t. What you pick now determines what you enjoy tomorrow. What you decide not to choose also determines what you’ll never have in this lifetime.

So at the end of the day—or even at the end of your life—you can be an average person and blame others for what did or didn’t happen for you. Or you can be a compassionate samurai and enjoy yourself even amid dire circumstances and create a life of liberty for yourself and others.

If liberty is so great, why aren’t there more compassionate samurai experiencing it? The answer is because there’s a cost for everything. There’s no free lunch. Every benefit has a corresponding cost or something you must give up. There’s a price to acknowledging that you have choices (as there are different consequences for pretending that you don’t). There are costs for making the compassionate samurai choice, as well as for taking the easier way out. At West Point, we were taught always to choose the harder right rather than the easier wrong. They were teaching us to be compassionate samurai. Some might argue about the compassionate part, but we’ll save that for another discussion.

If we wimp out and don’t make the right choices, we lose our liberty.

Frankl once recommended the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be complemented by a "Statue of Responsibility" on the West Coast. Perhaps he was saying that our liberty requires us to make good decisions. If we wimp out and don’t make the right choices, we lose our liberty. When we do this, we choose obvious short-term benefits with not-so-obvious long-term costs over obvious short-term costs that have not-so-obvious long-term benefits. The very nature of a compassionate samurai is to pick the latter.

I’m concerned with what I see in American society; in fact, that was the impetus for writing this book. Listen to average people complain about how their children won’t benefit from the Social Security program, yet they’re unwilling to change their lifestyle in any way. Look at how average people enjoy the benefits of their current status, but they shrink from considering the future environmental impact of their excesses on their grandchildren even to the point of being "confused" about whether global warming and other such issues are real.

Consider those who made huge amounts of money in the Enron, Tyco, and even Arthur Andersen scandals, with no concern for the thousands who lost their retirement savings as a result—let alone the damages the economy suffered or the cynicism about business that was generated. This isn’t really a new thing. Such behavior has occurred throughout history in nations and families who received abundance rather than earning it. A different, higher value is established when something is earned. When life is painful enough, moving forward becomes a more obvious and easier choice to make for the average individual.

Excerpted from The Compassionate Sumurai: Being Extraordinary in an Ordinary World by Brian Klemmer

Two Choices We Face

by Jim Rohn

Each of us have two distinct choices to make about what we will do with our lives... The first choice we can make is to be less than we have the capacity to be. To earn less. To have less. To read less and think less. To try less and discipline ourselves less. These are the choices that lead to an empty life. These are the choices that, once made, lead to a life of constant apprehension instead of a life of wondrous anticipation.

And the second choice? To do it all! To become all that we can possibly be. To read every book that we possibly can. To earn as much as we possibly can. To give and share as much as we possibly can. To strive and produce and accomplish as much as we possibly can. All of us have the choice.

To do or not to do. To be or not to be. To be all, or to be less, or to be nothing at all.

Like the tree, it would be a worthy challenge for us all to stretch upward and outward to the full measure of our capabilities. Why not do all that we can, every moment that we can, the best that we can, for as long as we can?

Our ultimate life objective should be to create as much as our talent and ability and desire will permit. To settle for doing less than we could do is to fail in this worthiest of undertakings. Results are the best measurement of human progress. Not conversation. Not explanation. Not justification.

Results! And if our results are less than our potential suggests that they should be, then we must strive to become more today than we were the day before. The greatest rewards are always reserved for those who bring great value to themselves and the world around them as a result of who and what they have become.

To Your Success

In The Mirror

peter@thewealthyattitude.com

It was late. The tavern was sparsely populated. At the bar a man drank slowly in silence, watching himself intently in the bar mirror with each movement he made, and even staring at himself he made none. I wondered why he was so deep in thought and so I sat beside him, smiled, and offered to buy him a drink for the secret of the mirror.

He looked at me in the mirror and slowly smiled. "Ah my friend, the mirror, in truth, holds many secrets." he said. "Take a good look and them tell me what is it you see there. A reflection. Maybe ! But a reflection of what? If what you see is real. Is it the truth. Or maybe is it the truth we want to see. Have you ever taken the time to really look, to stare into the face of yourself. Think about it, he said. Only here, in places like this can one sit and stare. You don't even have to be drinking to see the face changing again and again."

He smiled a knowing smirk into the mirror and then toasted me with his glass. All we are now, all we were, all we hope to be is there in the mirrors layers. I watched his eyes smiling reflection and then looked into my own reflection, my bearded face looked back at me, but now it was somehow not the same. The eyes locked on each other and I was then transported through time itself.

Looking back were the eyes of wonder on a child’s face gazing with innocence imprinted with all I had seen forever etched and burnt into the who I am. The good times, the love. But also all the things that should not have been. How can adults not think a child does not see with eyes connected to the soul and all the words and intentions mean nothing for the eyes record only actions.

The face grew older, and the eyes grew confident and arrogant with teen years. Mirrors were used frequently now, but only to preen, to primp, and to worry, for this was a time of self indulgence, of holding all the world in school dance. That face was so full of pride, of joy, its reflection saw no truth, only dreams.

The ageing begins. The face ceases to smile as much responsibility comes, eyes worry about finding and holding a good job to be able to afford the dream. At the same time the small loves are long forgotten for the real one has come. The face becomes a remembrance of the joy of that love with eyes sparkling. once so real, so perfect it seems now surreal, part only of that other lost time

My new friend spoke and broke the spell and I marveled at the mirrors power, he smiled and said, "You see, you are there, as am I, as are all of us. We see the things we are and those we think we are, and those we hope to be, the things we gave up to be who we were, the things to come we will give up. Dreams lost and gained, love lost and won, wonderful victories and defeats We can see the face of who we wanted to be and who is it we have become."

He continued. "I have watched myself become a man, fall in love, and marry. I can see the loving husband I became, the caring father face with the kids, a worker, business man working always so hard trying to provide for the family. Trying to find that balance that never seems to come between providing enough so everyone can have all they demand or need and spending time with them.

Seeing the face of my dreams change from a goal together into just survival, watching the precious time of life’s loving together slowly slip away into oblivion. I see all of this, and so much more, for the mirrors reflection changes constantly" "But in all of this there is something I no longer see", he said with deep regret.

What is that I ask ? He looked over at me with such sadness in his eyes. He slowly took his drink and drank it down, and as he got up to leave he said "I don't see me !!!!."...I hesitantly lifted my head and looked, to see if I was there.

Try it sometime. Just look into a mirror for a while. Watch the faces change. See the eyes ask and answer questions you did not even know you had.

And hope.....when you are done.....you can say....with truth..."I can see me"

Confusion - the Door to Deeper Wisdom

By Karen Wright

I've been giving some thought to the role of confusion in our lives. Like other emotions and mental states that don't feel productive, most of us would like to banish it from existence. But, if we look just a little closer, we might be able to see the silver lining. I woke from sleep a few nights ago with all these thoughts pouring from my barely conscious mind. So, because this has happened before, I grabbed the pad and pen that always sit by my bed and began to write. It was still dark out, but I have a pen that glows in the dark, so I didn't have to turn on the lights. Somehow all that brightness has a way of erasing dreams.

What I heard in my sleep was that confusion is a place where we have greater access to wisdom. When we stop thinking habitual thoughts, it's like we open a door. Thought actually blocks wisdom. When our brains can't figure something out they go a little nuts. You might relate? After all, that's what a brain is for... to figure things out. When it can't, we sort of stall. If we don't fight to get out of that stall, we can transition from one mode of knowing to another. From intellectual logic to deeper wisdom.

I also heard that wisdom isn't just a more advanced and elevated thought form. Wisdom is a place of no thinking - no mind. For anyone who finds peace in meditating, you have undoubtedly experienced this. Every meditation advice I've ever heard encourages you to NOT think, but to let thoughts simply come and go like clouds passing by. It's the non-thinking place that meditation aims for. In that non-thinking place, we connect with spirit.

From the time we first understood what thought was, we've been taught that thinking was the king of skills and education is supreme. What we forget is that education is derived from the Latin word educere which is the basis of the English word educe. To educate means to draw out - to bring forth. So, rather than an education system that tries to fill our students up, does this mean that we should instead be drawing forth wisdom from them? Well, let's not go there right now. Suffice it to say that thinking has become accepted as the bright person's way to the good life.

And thinking certainly does have its place. But, it's not our only tool. It would be like a carpenter having only a hammer. That's fine for some jobs, but not for everything. We've never been taught that we have any other faculties at our disposal than just thinking. Sometimes we need to put thought away and let non-thought educe the wisdom we already have within us.

We do this all the time, unthinkingly (pun totally intended!). When we daydream or our thoughts drift, we often return to a deeper sense of knowing by default. Like a bubble rising from the depths of the pond, wisdom surfaces in the moment of confusion to reveal an answer or insight that no amount of thinking could ever reach. Remember times when you tried really hard to recall something, but couldn't? And then hours later or in the middle of the night, when you weren't thinking of it at all, the memory resurfaced.

Like any unused muscle, learning how to not-think is going to take some time and practice to build to strength. Especially since when you find yourself not thinking, the first thing you do is think, "Hey, I'm not thinking!" Which is, of course, a thought! One way to develop your non-thought muscle is to experience the emotion of satisfaction without putting words to it. Look out at a beautiful sunset that just takes your breath away. Notice that it also, for just a moment, takes your words away too. That's the moment of non-thought. It's a feeling. A deep connection that no words could ever explain.

So, unlike your school teachers' advice, I'd recommend that in the coming days you practice the art of non-thought. Notice when you do, but don't comment on it... not even to yourself. Become more aware of the incessant dialog you have going on in your mind and stop feeding it more words. Are you a person who is compelled to verbalize every thought you have and every experience you're in? Do you stand before that majestic sunset and say, "What a beautiful sunset!" even if no one else is there? This is the first place to start. Break your addiction to words. Just let yourself feel the sunset, not comment on it.

Notice this week when you're feeling confused. Instead of struggling to find an answer to the confusion, stop and let it be. Know that in the fog of confusion, a path to a deeper knowing is opening up. Anticipate it and be expectant. Feel the freedom that not knowing allows you. Breathe and feel... don't think. It's at times like these that thinking will kill your inner wisdom. Welcome confusion.
It's where we let go of our little restrictive view of life.

And it's the only place where we can discover the truth beyond the circumstances.

The 5.75 Big Life Questions

peter@thewealthyattitude.com

I have to tell you, as I think it's important, the new mailing format for the "readers" is proving out to be much more relevant than even I thought it would be. As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, I wanted to put more power in the hands of our readers, power to comment back on issues through the new blog, power to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically, and power to refer the program just by forwarding a website link. All grand stuff.

From this desk, it is also an awesome tool for analysis of the effectiveness of the whole initiative. I get to see how many of the "readers" are opened, how many click-on's to the blog etc. Great stuff, and here is an example of what I mean.

Last week we touched on some really great material, and by a country mile, the one that got most of the subscribers attention, for the whole week of subjects, was the article on "Gossip, Rumor, and Innuendo". And I mean by a huge margin. Interesting eh? I'd certainly like to hear more on why you think that is so. I invite you all to comment on the blog on why you think it got the most attention.

So, on to today's offering.

To get the week off to a grand start, I thought it would be appropriate to hold on a "reader", and bring you a neat video about the "5.75 Questions" to get you thinking about where you are in your life. I think you'll be forwarding this one on to folks inyour own life path.

Click the link, sit back and consider.
The 5.75 Big Questions

Laugh out loud today!

Take care,

~peter~

Make "Luck" Happen!

peter@thewealthyattitude.com

Do you know someone who's always lucky - a friend or colleague for whom things just work out - as if by magic?

The concept of luck brings up an age-old question: "Are some people born lucky and others not?" The answer to both parts of this question is "no." You - right now - have the ability to create your own luck. So-called luck is simply the ability to attract your desires into your life.

In fact, researcher Dr. Richard Wiseman conducted a ten-year scientific study on "the luck factor" and discovered that lucky people "generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."

Philosopher William James referred to attitude as the "mother of luck." If a positive attitude is the mother of luck, then attraction and abundance round out the family. If you expect a positive outcome, you generally get one. If you pour energy intoworrying about a bad outcome, you may create a self-fulfilling prophesy. The law of attraction influences luck as well. Like attracts like; what you put out, you get back.

What you focus on influences your results. And a positive attitude plus positiveattraction equals abundance in all areas of life - including luck.

Follow this acronym to create your own lucky breaks:


L - Listen and let go. Listen to your intuition and detach from the outcome. Stay focused on your intuitive desires rather than on attempting to control the outcome.

U- Understand and notice. Observe your environment. Be mindful of opportunities. Take your blinders off and see what you've missed.

C - Claim what you want. You've got to know what you want. Observe what you deny yourself. It's impossible to create abundance from scarcity - as lucky people know.

K - Keep at it. Listen to your intuition, observe your environment and claim what you want; then take inspired action.

Once your "luck" begins to change and the good times roll in, be mindful. It's common to experience an identity shift as you attract more desires into your life. This may unconsciously - or consciously - activate your fear. You may feel like you're inunfamiliar territory and not entirely sure of the ground rules.
Persevere. Stay the course. Continue to follow the tenets of the LUCK acronym to help you through this growth spurt.

The next time you catch yourself waiting for a lucky break, take luck into your own hands. Survey your beliefs and thoughts; be aware of what you attract and watch your deepest desires flow more smoothly into your life. Empower yourself and watch the good fortunes of lady luck come your way.

How To Make Your Own Luck Some folks do have all the luck -- and psychologist Richard Wiseman can teach you how to be one of the lucky few.....Continue on here!

How To Make Your Own Luck

By Daniel Pink

Some folks do have all the luck -- and psychologist Richard Wiseman can teach you how to be one of the lucky few.

"It's better to be lucky than smart." "You make your own luck in life." "Some folks are just born lucky." In an environment marked by rising tensions and diminished expectations, most of us could use a little luck -- at our companies, in our careers, with our investments. Richard Wiseman thinks that he can help you find some.

Wiseman, 37, is head of a psychology research department at the University of Hertfordshire in England. For the past eight years, he and his colleagues at the university's Perrott-Warrick Research Unit have studied what makes some people lucky and others not. After conducting thousands of interviews and hundreds of experiments, Wiseman now claims that he's cracked the code. Luck isn't due to kismet, karma, or coincidence, he says. Instead, lucky folks -- without even knowing it -- think and behave in ways that create good fortune in their lives. In his new book, The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles (Miramax, 2003), Wiseman reveals four approaches to life that turn certain people into luck magnets. (And, as luck would have it, he tells the rest of us how to improve our own odds.)

Wiseman's four principles turn out to be slightly more polished renditions of some of the self-help canon's greatest hits. One thing Wiseman discovered, for example, was that when things go awry, the lucky "turn bad luck into good" by seeing how they can squeeze some benefit from the misfortune. (Lemonade, anyone?) The lucky also "expect good fortune," which no doubt has
Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, grinning in his grave.

But if these insights aren't exactly groundbreaking, neither are they wrongheaded. For instance, Wiseman found that lucky people are particularly open to possibility. Why do some people always seem to find fortune? It's not dumb luck. Unlike everyone else, they see it. "Most people are just not open to what's around them," Wiseman says. "That's the key to it."

Wiseman began his career as a teenage magician who joined London's prestigious Magic Circle society and journeyed to Hollywood to perform for thousands. "Magic is very good training for seeing the world from somebody else's perspective," he says. Wiseman's latest research makes several forays into areas where most scholars rarely tread: He has investigated the psychological underpinnings of magic, the dynamics of deception, and the psychology of the paranormal. In 2001, he achieved international notoriety conducting a yearlong search for the world's funniest joke, testing how some 350,000 participants reacted to 40,000 jokes.

I was lucky enough to catch up with the hip and affable professor at a café overlooking London's Hyde Park.

How did a serious academic like you become interested in a squishy subject like luck?

Round about 10 years ago, I was talking to people about why they'd ended up where they'd ended up in their lives -- the people they were with, the careers they were in, and so on. And the words that kept coming up were things like "luck" and "chance." People said, "I met my partner by chance." Or "I'm in this particular career because I just happened to go to this party." I knew from the psychology literature that psychologists avoided luck. They said you couldn't do science with it. So I decided to test that. I did some research that asked people, "Do you consider yourself unlucky, or lucky?"

Over time, we built up a database of about 400 people from all over the UK, all walks of life, who considered themselves especially lucky or unlucky. The people in both groups were saying, "I've no idea why this is the case; I'm just lucky" -- or unlucky. But I didn't believe that for a minute. I thought there was something else going on. So in the Luck Project, we've had them take part in experiments, interviewed them, had them keep diaries -- all sorts of things -- trying to piece together why you'd have one group of people for whom everything would work out well and another group for whom things would be completely disastrous.

Isn't there a distinction between chance and luck?

There's a big distinction. Chance events are like winning the lottery. They're events over which we have no control, other than buying a ticket. They don't consistently happen to the same person. They may be formative events in people's lives, but they're not frequent. When people say that they consistently experience good fortune, I think that, by definition, it has to be because of something they are doing.

In other words, they make their own luck.

That's right. What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?

One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

How did you uncover that in your lab?

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

But the business culture typically worships drive -- setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?

This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.

Yes. You don't want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it's right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you've built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That's what our brains are set up to do.

What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?

They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.
Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there."

What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

Isn't there something delusional about that approach -- sort of a modern version of Dr. Pangloss's "All for the best in the best of all possible worlds"? Suppose I said, "I just wrote this article, and the article stinks, and nobody read it. But hey, at least I have two arms."

What's so delusional about that? If it keeps you going in the face of adversity and softens the impact of the fact that no one read your article, and therefore you think, "Well, I can write another article, and I'm going to learn from the mistakes of the past one, and I'm going to keep on going," I think that's fine. It would be delusional if you took it to the extreme -- especially if you weren't learning from your mistakes.

But can we acknowledge that sometimes bad stuff -- car accidents, natural disasters -- just happens? Sometimes it's purely bad, and there's nothing good about it.

I've never heard that from a lucky person.

So if you buy that way of thinking, then there is no bad luck.

That's right. That's what was weird about conducting some of the interviews. Subjects would say, "I'm the luckiest person alive" -- and they'd come up with dreadful stories. They'd have the same life events as the unlucky person, but they'd look at them entirely differently.

Isn't that just a fancy version of the power of positive thinking?

There's more science to it -- as opposed to the classic "Just think positive, and you'll be successful." I think if you understand a little about where it's coming from, it's a bit easier to adapt into your life.

We had a subject named Carolyn. When she would come to the unit to be interviewed, it would be just this whole string of bad-luck stories: "I can't find anyone. I'm unlucky in love. When I did find someone, the guy fell off his motorbike. The next blind date broke his nose. We were supposed to get married, and the church burned down." But to every single interview, she'd bring along her two kids. They were 6 and 7 years old -- very healthy, very happy kids who'd sit there and play. And it was interesting, because most people would love to have two kids like that, but that wasn't part of her world, because she was unlucky in her mind.

How do you get people to begin thinking like lucky people?

We've created a Luck School that teaches people certain techniques. One thing that we do is have people keep a luck diary. At the end of each day, they spend a couple of moments writing down the positive and lucky things that happened. We ask them not to write down the unlucky stuff. Once that starts to build up, what they're doing is adding on, each day. So they look back, and it's five days' worth of positive events, and now it's day six. After doing that for a month, it's difficult not to be thinking about the good things that are happening.

What are the applications of your research to business?

We've just done our first Luck School with an entire company. We took all 35 employees through it. The CEO was very open to change. The ideas resonated with him because that's how he has lived his life. So when he heard them, he said, "I want everybody in my organization to think like this." If we did nothing but make his employees feel better about themselves, he'll be a happy man. If it has an impact on profits and productivity, he'll be a very happy man.

Do you think that lucky organizations really exist?

Yes. Whether it translates to just percentages of lucky people, or whether it translates to a particular mixture, where some score high on one principle and others score high on another, I don't know. In the sense of organizational culture and identity, I think that some organizations will be seen as lucky and successful and others will be seen as unlucky, in the same way that individuals are.

You spent a year trying to find the world's funniest joke. Could you tell us the joke that won?

Two New Jersey hunters go hunting. After a while, one of the hunters clutches his throat and falls to the ground, his eyes roll back, and he's lying there motionless. The other one picks up a cell phone, dials 911, and says, "I think my friend is dead! I don't know what to do!" And the operator says, "Just relax. Calm down. The first thing to do is to make certain your friend is dead." There's a pause -- then a gunshot. And the hunter gets back on the phone and says, "Okay. Now what?"

That's some bad luck for the friend.

Yes, unfortunately. But bad luck is funny.

Bad luck is funny?

Bad luck is funny -- provided it's not happening to you.

Sidebar: Wanna Get Lucky?

According to Richard Wiseman, these four principles can create good fortune in your life and career.

1. Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.

2. Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities -- for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

3. Expect Good Fortune

Lucky people are certain that the future will be bright. Over time, that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.

4. Turn Bad Luck Into Good

Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, they don't dwell on the ill fortune, and they take control of the situation.

Daniel H. Pink (dp@danpink.com), author of Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself