Beyond Coincidence Page 9

  The preacher, Walter Klempel, lit the furnace at the West Side Baptist Church and then went home for dinner. His return to the church with his family was delayed when his daughter’s dress was soiled and his wife had to iron another for her.

  Ladona Vandergrift, a high school student, was having trouble with a geometry problem. She decided to solve it before leaving for choir practice.

  Royena Estes couldn’t get her car to start, so she and her sister called Ladona Vandergrift and asked her to pick them up. But Ladona was still working on her geometry problem, so the Estes sisters had to wait.

  Marilyn Paul, the pianist, had planned to arrive half an hour early, but fell asleep after dinner …

  And so the list of delays went on. The entire choir, all of whom were normally punctual for practice, were late that evening.

  At 7:25, the church blew up. The walls fell outward, the heavy wooden roof crashed to the ground. Firemen thought the explosion had been caused by natural gas that had leaked into the church from a broken pipe outside and been ignited by the fire in the furnace.

  A major tragedy had been averted by the narrowest of multiple squeaks. The grateful Beatrice church choir members put their amazing good luck down to an act of God. But you don’t have to be in a church choir to narrowly escape death.

  John Woods, a senior partner in a large legal firm, left his office in one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York seconds before the building was struck by a hijacked aircraft. It wasn’t his first close brush with death. He had been on the thirty-ninth floor of the same building when it was bombed in 1993, but escaped without injury. In 1988 he was scheduled to be on the Pan-Am flight that exploded above Lockerbie in Scotland, but canceled at the last minute in order to go to an office party.

  Unlike John Woods, Yugoslavian flight attendant Vesna Vulvic failed to avoid traveling on a plane destined to explode.

  A terrorist bomb was thought to be the cause of the massive explosion that ripped apart the DC-9 aircraft traveling over the former Czechoslovakia on January 26, 1972.

  Rescue workers who came upon the tangled wreckage on the ground didn’t believe anyone could still be alive. Then they found flight attendant Vesna Vulvic inside part of the fuselage. She was badly injured, but still breathing. She was the only person to survive.

  Asked afterward how she accounted for her incredible good luck she said, “I believe we are masters of our lives—we hold all the cards and it is up to us to use them right.”

  It’s hard to decide whether Vesna Vulvic is a lucky or unlucky person. She had the misfortune to be on the plane in the first place, but was extraordinarily lucky to have survived. Just as some people seem to get more than their fair share of good fortune, others appear to attract atrocious bad luck.

  Frenchman Alain Basseux, a laboratory technician working in England, lost his temper when a motorist cut him off in a traffic circle. He chased the offending car for two miles, forced the vehicle to the side of the road, yanked open the door, and grabbed the driver by the shirt. At this point he noticed that the man he was assaulting was his boss.

  The local magistrates conditionally discharged him for two years, after his lawyer told the court that such behavior was not unusual in France.

  Mr. Basseux kept his job.

  So he was lucky in the end. Not so this gentleman:

  Businessman Danie de Toit made a speech to an audience in South Africa warning them that death could strike them at any time. At the end of the speech he put a peppermint in his mouth, and choked to death on it.

  A New Yorker cartoon by Mischa Richter pictures God hurling thunderbolts down from the clouds. “If you’re so good,” an angel is saying, “why can’t you strike twice in the same place?”

  In fact lightning does strike the same place more than once.

  The Primarda family of Taranto, Italy, has lost three men to lightning strikes, in three generations; two were struck in the same backyard. In 1899 a bolt of lightning killed a man as he stood in his backyard in Taranto, Italy. Thirty years later his son, standing in the same spot, was also struck and killed by a bolt of lightning. On 8 October 1949, Rolla Primarda, the grandson of the first victim and the son of the second, became the third member of the family to step into that garden during a storm.

  Lightning can also strike the same person twice. You might think if you had been struck by lightning once you would have paid your dues to bad fortune and would be invulnerable, yet the odds of being struck again are exactly the same.

  A Virginia forest ranger was pursued by lightning with apparently vindictive single-mindedness.

  During his thirty-six years as a ranger, Roy Cleveland Sullivan was struck no less than seven times. On the first occasion, in 1942, he escaped with the loss of the nail of his big toe. Twenty-seven years later he was struck by a bolt of lightning that singed his eyebrows. The next year, another strike burned his left shoulder. In 1972 lightning set his hair on fire. In 1973 he was blasted out of his car. The sixth strike, in 1976, injured his ankle, and the seventh strike in 1977, while he was fishing, sent him to hospital with chest and stomach burns.

  We expect déjà vu to give us a frisson, not a ten-megawatt charge.

  What had Sullivan done to deserve such terrible luck? Six years after the seventh strike he committed suicide. The reason, reported at the time, was because he was unlucky in love. A case of not being chosen.

  Lightning struck Jennifer Roberts only once, as she lay in a tent one night back in October 1991. But once was enough.

  Caught in a violent electrical storm, twenty-four-year-old Jennifer was struck by a bolt of lightning that scorched the length of her body. She was saved from more serious injury because she had just removed her under-wired bra, which had been irritating her. The metal wires would have deflected the electricity to her heart.

  The bolt also destroyed the book Jennifer was reading. Its cover bore the image of a head surrounded by lightning flashes.

  Good and bad luck often come in clusters. Gamblers talk about being on a roll. Charles Wells’s lucky roll, if that’s what it was, broke the bank at Monte Carlo. More often the luck runs the other way and the shirt is lost from the gambler’s back. We can be blessed with good fortune or cursed with ill-fortune—jinxed. The latter seems to have applied in the case of this royal wedding:

  The wedding day of Princess Maria del Pozzo della Cisterna and Amadeo, the Duke d’Aosta, son of the king of Italy, in Turin, on May 30, 1867, was certainly not the happiest day in the lives of a number of those involved. The wardrobe mistress hanged herself, the palace gatekeeper cut his throat, the colonel leading the wedding procession collapsed from sunstroke, the stationmaster was crushed to death under the wheels of the honeymoon train, the king’s aide fell from his horse and died and the best man shot himself.

  Apart from that it was a lovely day. A similar sort of jinx seems to have afflicted many of the people associated with the comic book character Superman.

  The bad luck began with the two men who created the superhero back in 1938. Writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster signed away their rights to the Man of Steel for a pittance; their various attempts to sue the publishers for a fairer share of the millions made from their creation all failed. Shuster had become a recluse by the time he died.

  The actor Kirk Alyn, who played Superman in the 1940s Saturday matinee serial, claimed that it had ruined his career. He struggled to find work and eventually gave up acting. George Reeves, who starred in television’s The Adventures of Superman in the 1950s, also struggled professionally when the hit series finished after six years. In 1959, at the age of forty-five, he was found dead from a single bullet wound to the head. The official verdict was suicide, but friends were convinced he was murdered.

  Christopher Reeve, who played Superman in four films in the 1970s and 1980s, was thrown from his horse in 1995, broke his neck and ended up on a respirator and in a wheelchair. Margot Kidder, who costarred as Lois Lane in all four o
f Reeve’s Superman films, damaged her spinal cord in 1990 in a car accident while filming a TV series and was confined to a wheelchair for two years. A history of drink and drug abuse and mental illness eventually led to a nervous breakdown. Richard Pryor, who costarred in Superman III, was struck down with multiple sclerosis soon after filming was completed.

  Most of us don’t experience extremes of either good or bad luck. Most of us, alas, don’t win huge amounts on the lottery and very few of us fall foul of the “Curse of Superman.”

  Nevertheless we each tend to think of ourselves as being innately lucky or unlucky people. We’re either the type for whom the bread always falls butter side up … or the type whose bread falls, relentlessly, sticky side down. Lucky people appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of life’s breaks. Unlucky people are always out when opportunity knocks.

  Psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman has spent the last ten years finding out why some people lead happy, successful lives while others face repeated failure and sadness. He also wanted to know whether or not unlucky people can do anything to improve their luck. He doesn’t believe that good and bad luck is simply a matter of chance.

  He says, “For over a hundred years psychologists have studied how our lives are affected by our intelligence, personality, genes, appearance, and upbringing—but very little work has gone into examining good and bad luck.” The results of his study can be found in his book, The Luck Factor.

  He decided to search for the elusive “luck factor” by investigating the beliefs and experiences of people who considered themselves to be innately lucky or unlucky. The research involved extensive interviews with hundreds of people. Many interviews were videotaped and Dr. Wiseman studied not just what his volunteers said but how they said it—their general demeanor.

  Lucky people, he noticed, smile more and engage in more eye contact. Lucky people engage in three times as much open body language as unlucky people.

  Lucky people persevere with Chinese puzzles, he observed. Unlucky people discard them in seconds, convinced they could never solve them. Lucky people, given a newspaper and told to count the number of photographs, spot the half-page message on page three declaring:

  LOOK NO FURTHER, THERE ARE 42 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.

  Unlucky people plough on through to the end, oblivious to the opportunity to curtail their task.

  In another experiment Dr. Wiseman took two volunteers who both worked in the business world—Robert (who considered himself a lucky person) and Brenda (who thought herself unlucky)—and invited them, separately, to go to a café and wait for someone connected with the experiment to contact them.

  Dr. Wiseman had already placed three stooges at each of three tables in the café. At the fourth table he placed a genuine businessmen who was, potentially, a useful contact for either Robert or Brenda. He wanted to know which of them would manage to take advantage of this real opportunity.

  Robert arrived at the shop, ordered a coffee and sat down next to the successful businessman. Within minutes, he’d introduced himself to the stranger, and offered to buy him a coffee. The man accepted and a few moments later the two of them were chatting away.

  When it was Brenda’s turn, she entered the café, ordered a coffee and sat down next to the businessman. Unlike Robert, she didn’t say a word.

  The result was much as Dr. Wiseman had anticipated. “Same opportunities—different lives,” he points out.

  Luck, he concludes, has little to do with chance or coincidence. Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives. They use their intuition and gut feelings.

  “We make our own luck,” says Dr. Wiseman. “Your future isn’t set in stone. You are not destined always to experience a certain amount of good fortune. You can change. You can create far more lucky breaks and massively increase how often you are in the right place at the right time. When it comes to luck the future is in your hands.”

  Many of Dr. Wiseman’s volunteers believed themselves to be innately lucky or unlucky. “One person, who wanted to be a freelance writer, turned up at a newspaper office just as its regular writer was leaving. She got the job. Her whole life was like that. Another woman had eight accidents in one fifty-mile journey. She put it down to bad luck—and then we saw her park her car and realized that there was more to it than a jinxed car. Another was unlucky in love. Her blind date came off his motorbike and broke his leg. Another prospective boyfriend walked into a glass door and broke his nose. She eventually got engaged to be married, but the church was burned down by arsonists a week before the ceremony.”

  Dr. Wiseman tested his luck theories by putting many of his “unlucky” volunteers through “luck school,” which involved one-on-one counseling sessions, puzzle-solving experiments, questionnaires, and diary keeping. It was all focused on getting people who believed they were unlucky to start thinking and behaving like lucky people. He urged them to change their attitude to bad luck, to trust their intuition, and to spot and take advantage of opportunities when they arose.

  He says, “At the beginning we had no idea if it would work. But we have now seen that 80 percent of people feel happier, more satisfied, and most important of all, luckier. We know it works for most people. For some people the improvements are relatively small. For others, especially the very unlucky people, it can have a dramatic effect on their lives. Like Tracey Hart.

  Before she went to luck school, Tracey considered herself an exceptionally unlucky person. “Bad luck didn’t come in threes for me,” she says. “It came in fifteens and twenty-ones.” She fell down holes, suffered concussion and a variety of cuts and bruises. A play session with her daughter once laid her out for six weeks. “If I won $20 on the lottery, twenty things would go wrong the next week,” she says.

  The two lengthy relationships of her life, with the fathers of her two children, both ended in domestic violence. Not surprisingly her health suffered and she became depressed.

  And then she met Richard Wiseman and signed up for luck school.

  Since then, she reports, she has become a different person. When misfortune strikes now she reminds herself that “it could have been worse.” She says she’s become a lot more positive in her whole attitude to life. And, indeed, misfortune has become a less regular caller. She can’t remember the last time she fell down a hole or had concussion. She’s got a new job, a new home, and a new man in her life.

  And she’s even winning on the lottery and at bingo. “Dr. Wiseman says this is nothing to do with my gaining control of my life. But it’s uncanny how often I win now,” she says. “A friend of mine was very skeptical about luck school but I persuaded him to follow the principles for a week. During that week we went to bingo and won $1,500 between us. He went home with $1,000 and is now a lot less skeptical.”

  Dr. Wiseman has recently extended his research to explore whether his luck school principles can be applied to groups of people—in the workplace.

  The workplace in question belongs to Technical Asset Management, who repair, upgrade, and recycle computers and other IT hardware. He was invited by Managing Director Kevin Riches to see if he could improve the luck of the company.

  Kevin explains, “We’d had an enormous bad debt. It amounted to over three-quarters of a million dollars. To make matters worse we had just gone into a period of expansion and had moved into expensive new premises. The bank found out about the debt and decided to add to our bad luck by withdrawing facilities. We were really struggling. We really needed help if we were to turn things around.”

  Richard Wiseman came along to their premises and addressed all thirty-eight members of the staff, many of whom were decidedly skeptical that their collective luck could be improved. But nearly all agreed to take part in one-on-one sessions with the psychologist, and to keep diaries that cataloged their progress.

  “I know it all sounds very impractical,” says Kevin Riches. “Some
of my business colleagues thought we were mad and even our chairman said it was all mumbo jumbo. He didn’t want it introduced to the rest of the group. Mind you everybody said if it works, let us know.”

  And did it work?

  “It did work. It’s been amazing. Productivity went up 20 percent month after month during the period Richard was working with us. And it has continued. We had a record month last month and the business is going from strength to strength.”

  But could the improvement in the company’s fortunes have been just coincidence? “It could have been,” says Kevin. “However, working in this business and looking at how we handled new opportunities, I would say our luck training has made a big difference. We have developed a different mindset. We’ve taken the blinkers off and are now alert to new openings. We’ve won lots of interesting new business, and it’s all been great for morale.”

  So is Technical Asset Management now a luckier company? “Undoubtedly,” says Kevin. “And we will keep it up.”

  Richard Wiseman is very pleased that TAM has managed to turn around its fortunes, but he’s reluctant to take too much credit for the company’s good fortune. He says, “It was great that they were open to the crazy idea of a psychologist trying to create a luckier company. But it is just one case study. It would be interesting to see what would happen if other organizations went through the same processes. If we saw the same results again and again we could be more certain that they were the result of luck school.”

  Kevin Riches turned to psychology to change his company’s luck. Those who thought this approach was mumbo jumbo would have been even more appalled if he had chosen to place his faith in lucky charms or superstitious rituals. Yet countless people seem to be prepared to place an unlikely amount of faith in the power of a rabbit’s foot or the efficacy of a carefully circumvented ladder.

  The famous physicist Niels Bohr was once asked why he had a horseshoe hanging over his office door. “Surely you don’t believe that will make any difference to your luck?” a colleague asked. “No,” came the reply. “But I hear it works even for those who don’t believe.”