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there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

This connects with some thoughts I have been having about the web as a “synchronicity engine”, about how developing networks literacies can help you make the right connections not only when using the web but all of your life…

I started developing some thoughts around this for “Me and My Web Shadow”, but in the final edit have removed them as it felt like too much of a tangent.

It’s great to see John Hagel developing the synchronicity theme for management thinking (see the video I posted a few days ago). I’m finding that line of thinking every useful indeed.

Blog post (almost certainly) to follow soon…