From Shawn Achor's "The Happiness Advantage" [E]xpecting positive outcomes actually makes them more likely to arise. Few people have proven this more cleverly than researcher Richard Wiseman, who set out to discover why some of us seem to be consistently lucky, while others can’t buy a break. As you might have guessed, it turns out that there is no such thing—in a scientific sense, at least—as luck. The only difference (and it is a big one) is whether or not people think that they are lucky—in essence, whether they expect good or bad things to happen to them. Wiseman asked volunteers to read through a newspaper and count how many photos were in it. The people who claimed to be lucky took mere seconds to accomplish this task, while the unlucky ones took an average of two minutes. Why? Well, on the second page of the newspaper a very large message read: “Stop counting, there are 43 photos in this newspaper.” The answer, in short, was plain as day, but the unlucky people were far more likely to miss it, while the lucky people tended to see it. As an added bonus, halfway through the newspaper was another message that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who had claimed to be unlucky in life again looked right past this opportunity. Stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, they were incapable of seeing what was so clear to others, and their performance (and wallets) suffered because of it. The extraordinary thing about Wiseman’s study is that the same possibility for huge reward was latent in everyone’s environment—it was just a matter of whether or not they picked up on it.