Why are some people lucky more than others?

Famous film actor and TV presenter James Scott Bumgarner, better known under the pseudonym of James Garner , recently passed away at the age of 86 years. Many people believe that he was a great man, and they love to tell stories about his life. How did a guy who has no acting experience and doesn’t like to speak to an audience, could get an influential Hollywood agent to take up his career? Lucky?

In 1935, the original talent hunt system was invented in Hollywood. Similarly, the "scouts" from the world of sports, to search for talented newcomers, these people closely followed the Broadway productions and radio programs. But sometimes they managed to find among the masses of people someone who had no acting experience, but looked like a real movie star.
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A great example is Lana Turner, one of the most spectacular and popular Hollywood actresses of the forties and fifties (shown to the right of James Garner in the picture from the Oscar award in 1966).



Lana was 16 years old when she left typing courses at a high school and sat with a glass of cola in a Hollywood soda shop. It was at this moment that someone paid attention to her attractiveness. She was introduced to one of the Hollywood agents and soon began acting in her first film. Beautiful girl, at the right time turned out to be the right place - pure luck.

In the biography of James Garner, there was also a story with the right place at the right time.

Before becoming an actor, he changed dozens of different jobs. He usually worked for several months, saved money, then quit working, lived for a while on what was saved, and then found a new place.

At the age of 17, one of James’s jobs was a tanker at the Shell station in Hollywood. It was here that James met Paul Gregory, who, at that moment in a pharmacy on the opposite side, was looking for people to work at a kiosk selling carbonated water.

But Paul Gregory dreamed of becoming a Hollywood agent, and offered James his services in that capacity.
James Garner was handsome - many people told him about it. But he had no intention of becoming an actor. So he just laughed at the offer.

Years later, James returned from the Korean War and saw the name of Paul Gregory in Newsweek magazine. By then, Paul had become a theater producer and had created three very successful productions.

About a year later, James arrived in Los Angeles, returning home after an unsuccessful attempt to get a job in oil wells in Saudi Arabia, and saw the sign: "Paul Gregory and Partners." He did not plan to stop, but suddenly noticed a free parking space in front of the office.

He parked the car and went inside to visit his old friend. Paul immediately decided to become an agent of James, send him to an acting school and help with the work. The result - a brilliant career in film and television.

This story is similar to many other stories about how someone was lucky in Hollywood. But is it?

Luck and bad luck are something that depends on chance, not on human actions.

Richard Wiseman, before becoming known as a psychologist, was a professional magician. Despite his interest in magic, he treats such things as superstition and talismans with a great deal of skepticism. Therefore, Wiseman devoted a significant part of his career to studying the phenomenon of luck.

In one experiment, he asked participants to describe themselves using the words "lucky" or "unlucky." Then he gave his subjects a newspaper, and ordered them to count the number of photographs printed in it.

There were 43 of them in total.

On average, unlucky people counting pictures took 2 minutes. What about the lucky ones? It took them seconds.
The fact is that half the second page of the newspaper was occupied by a huge advertisement. It said: “Stop counting - there are 43 photos in this newspaper”.

Unlucky people did not notice. They missed the second ad of the same size, located in the middle of the newspaper: "Stop counting, tell the experimenter that you saw this message, and win $ 250."

In the case of "lucky" people it was not luck. They were just more observant.

Just as was attentive and James Garner.

He fought in the Korean War and was often close to death. In his autobiography The Garner Files, James talks about a case that could well be catastrophic:

Soldiers from China and North Korea, as well as our allies from South Korea, lived on a diet of fish heads, rice and garlic. One night I was standing on guard and suddenly I felt a faint odor coming from the enemy’s positions. I did not see anything, but I realized that there was someone there, and he was approaching. Sensing the smell, I listened and still could hear them. It turned out that it was an enemy intelligence group heading straight for our position. When I reported their approach to command, they only approached the opposite side of the ascent. We managed to prepare and were able to repel the attack.

The fact that James noticed the approaching enemy soldiers probably saved the lives of many of his fellow soldiers, as well as his own. But in this case it is impossible to say that he was just lucky. It's all about mindfulness and formed willpower .

Wiseman in his study notes that unlucky people often consider themselves tense and anxious. Therefore, he conducted another experiment to find out how people are affected by anxiety.

He invited a group of people to watch the point moving on the screen, at which other, larger points blink from time to time. The subjects noticed all the big points. He repeated the experiment with the second group of people, but this time offered a financial reward to make them worry about the result. This group missed one third of the emerging large points.

Anxiety helps us focus, but it also does not allow us to notice the various opportunities that appear in our lives.

You may have noticed that people telling about the life of James often described him as a very relaxed guy:

James Garner, God rest his soul. One of my favorite actors. Always looked so calm on the screen. This movie star.

Russell Kane (@RussellKane)
James had reason to be relaxed.

He and his brothers grew up in a home where there were frequent instances of moral, physical, and sexual violence. It happened that his father forced the children to sing, and if they refused, he would whip. His stepmother constantly beat children and even raped her underage brother James.

In addition, James Garner grew up in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. This means that he, his family, friends and neighbors had to face such a phenomenon as a series of catastrophic dust storms, known as the Dust Cauldron.

Do you want to put pressure on the person who survived the Great Depression? Yes, and in Oklahoma. During dust storms. After such events, carping the bosses on the set will seem like a minor trifle.

And James was not particularly worried, as it was unlikely that something could be worse than what he had already experienced.

Wiseman also found that lucky people are trying hard to try something new and are happy to meet new people.

Remember all the places in which James managed to work?

And he personally knew everyone: members of the film crew, actors, and also many people in the cities where the filming took place. Gretchen Corbet, one of James's partners in the TV series “Rockford Files”, recalls:

Everybody loved him - but he was worried about not only me and other actors, but also about the team as a whole. He knew everyone by name, he even remembered the names of their children ...
And he became so not after he became famous. It always has been.
I happened to deal with the famous troika - Henry Fonda, Johnny Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan - at the same time as a bodyguard, an errand boy and a talisman.
On the first day of rehearsal, Lloyd never even looked at the script. All the others learned their roles, while Lloyd knew his perfectly. Henry Fonda was very surprised because the role of Captain Quig was quite difficult. “How the hell did you do that?” He asked Nolan. “I hired Bumgarner,” Lloyd told him. After this, Fonda asked me to suggest cues for him too. I agreed with pleasure.

James considered himself an introvert . But this does not mean that he did not use every opportunity to make friends with someone. He happily agreed to tidy up the movie star dressing rooms or help them learn roles, just to get close to new people.

The last item of Wiseman's research is that lucky people view as luck everything that happens to them, even if these are the same events that happened to unlucky people.

In the next experiment, Wiseman asked his lucky and unlucky subjects to describe a hypothetical situation in which each of them is in the bank, where the robber bursts in, shoots a pistol and hits him in the hand. Unlucky people complained that they were constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lucky people rejoiced - because the situation could be much worse. One of the participants in the experiment who considered themselves lucky noticed: “I was lucky because he could have fallen into his head.”

Again, if you recall the conditions in which James grew up, you will understand that after a terrible childhood everything that happened seemed to him just a blessing.

In one of the stories, James tells how he shared a motel room with two other guys:

There were only two beds, so I slept on the floor. The two marines stayed up all night and only groaned about how unhappy they were: it was their first Christmas away from home, and we were all just teenagers. I was completely calm about this issue. They were depressed and homesick, and I lay on the floor and was happier than ever.

It is easy to look at successful people and say that all their achievements are just luck. Of course, some people actually just catch luck by the tail or are born so beautiful that they are noticed on the street and are invited to act in films.

But, if you go back to the story of James Garner:

• Paul Gregory was just one of a huge number of friends whom James was not tired of making. The name of his friend, printed in Newsweek, a sign in Hollywood and a free parking space in front of the office, he noticed, not because he was lucky, but because of his observation. And, of course, he is very observant, because you can call him one of the most relaxed people, which are generally found on earth. Simply, he is happy that a terrible childhood is left behind.

Can you say that James Garner is luckier than we or you? May be. But only because he himself created his own success.

At the beginning of my acting career, I had no idea what I was doing. I acted almost at random, hoping that I was lucky.

PS We recommend another useful article on the work on yourself - 9 communication skills that any successful leader should possess .

The author of the translation is Vyacheslav Davidenko, the founder of the TESTutor company.