‘We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary good luck.’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET’
It is easy to assume that Sherlock’s great mind guaranteed success in his cases but he was subject to luck – good and bad – just like the rest of us.
In ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’, the case was solved ‘simply by having the good fortune to get the right clue from the beginning.’ Alternatively, in
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson talked of how ‘Luck had been against us again and again in this enquiry, but now at last it came to my aid.’
None of us can control the influence of good fortune on our lives but it may just be possible to tip the odds in our favour.
In 2003, Professor Richard Wiseman revealed the results of his ten-year study into good and bad luck. His findings suggested that ‘lucky’ people generate their own
good luck. He wrote in the Daily Telegraph:
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance
opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient
attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Wiseman is not the first authority to suggest that we can influence our own fortune. Ovid wrote, ‘Luck, affects everything; let your hook always be
cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish.’ The great movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn noted ‘The harder I work, the luckier I
get.’
There is anecdotal evidence, too, that great things can spring from a slice of good luck. Everything from Christopher Columbus stumbling upon
America while searching for a new eastern passage, to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and even the invention of Coca-Cola, all owed a
great deal to good fortune.
In short, if good fortune chooses to search you out, do not reject it. Embrace it. Sherlock Holmes certainly did when it came around.
0 comments:
Post a Comment