This article is a decade old but gets to the mechanisms behind a lot of successful brain hacking and life hacking. It can be thought of as the secret behind “The Secret.” In effect, people can create the reality they most want by just being open to that reality. Opportunities to get what we want are bombarding us all the time, but mostly we are blind to them. Some people, however, keep enough of their mind open to them that they perceive them and end up feeling lucky all the time. Powerful stuff. One wonderful experiment is described in the article:
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.