If you want to have more luck in your life (and in your college admissions process), it turns out you can create it.
According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles,” lucky people think and behave in ways that unlucky people don’t.
Here are the excerpts from an interview in Fast Company magazine. I think there are lots of ways to apply this to your college admissions process.
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.”
Do you have the initiative to take a psychology class outside of school just because it looks interesting, or to try karate just because it looks fun? Would you take the opportunity to start a car wash business with a friend or take a road trip to look at a college you’ve never heard of or introduce yourself to some students on campus once you got there? Lucky students would do those things. Unlucky students wouldn’t try anything unless they were guaranteed it could help them get into college.
2. Listen to your lucky hunches.
“Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings.”
Are you willing to listen to your gut instincts and apply to the colleges that you really believe are best for you, regardless of what your friends or the US News rankings say? Would you write the college essay you want to write about how you sing in the shower even though your parents think you should write about doing community service? Would you pick Oberlin over Princeton because it just felt right? Lucky students would. Unlucky students would never take what feels like a risk. They always want to do what feels safe and guaranteed.
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.”
Are you excited about your future life in college? Do believe that you’ll learn and have fun wherever you go to school? Do you have enough faith in yourself to know that your work ethic and personal characteristics, not the name of the college you go to, are what will ultimately make you successful? Lucky students do. Unlucky students believe that everything hinges on whether or not Stanford or Duke or UCLA says “Yes.”
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.
Whenever a parent tells me that her daughter is “just devastated” by a rejection from her dream college, there’s a part of me that wants to swoop in and tell that kid, “Get over it. Do you know how many people would do anything just to have the chance to go to college at all?”
Lucky students don’t dwell on college rejections, or the fact that they lost the election for senior class president, or that the their girlfriend broke up with them. They believe there’s too much life to live to get bogged down by those events. They know there are other colleges and other offices and other girls out there, and that they’ll probably end up with a better one now. Unlucky students just want to lament their fate.
You can be a lucky student (or parent) if you want to be.