Why are some people luckier than others?

Original author: Nathan Kontny
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Renowned film actor and TV host James Scott Bumgarner, better known by the pseudonym James Garner , recently passed away at the age of 86. Many people believe that he was a great man, and love to tell stories about his life. How did a guy who has no acting experience and does not like to speak to the public, able to get an influential Hollywood agent to pursue his career? Are you lucky?

In 1935, an original talent hunting system was invented in Hollywood. Like “scouts” from the world of sports, to search for talented newcomers, these people closely watched Broadway productions and radio programs. But sometimes they managed to find among the mass of people someone who had no acting experience, but looked like a real movie star.

A great example is Lana Turner, one of the most spectacular and popular Hollywood actresses of the forties and fifties (pictured to the right of James Garner in the picture from the 1966 Academy Award).

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Lana was 16 years old when she dropped out of typing at a high school and sat with a glass of cola in one of the Hollywood soda shops. It was at this moment that someone drew attention to her attractiveness. She was introduced to one of the Hollywood agents and soon began acting in her first film. A beautiful girl who has found herself in the right place at the right time is pure luck.

James Garner's biography also had a story with the right place at the right time.

Before becoming an actor, he changed dozens of different jobs. Usually he worked for several months, saved up money, then quit working, lived for some time on savings, after which he found a new place.

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

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 created three very successful productions.

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

Having parked the car, he went inside to visit his old friend. Paul immediately decided to become an agent of James, send him to acting school and help with work. The result is 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 failure is something that depends on chance, and not on human actions.

Richard Wiseman, before gaining fame as a psychologist, was a professional magician. Despite his interest in magic, he is quite skeptical about things like superstition and talismans. Therefore, Wiseman devoted a significant part of his career to the study of 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

in total. On average, unlucky people took 2 minutes to count the images. What about the lucky ones? It took them a few seconds.
The fact is that half of the second page of the newspaper was occupied by a huge announcement. It said: "Stop counting - there are 43 photographs in this newspaper."

Unlucky people did not notice this. They also missed a 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 James Garner was attentive.

He fought in the Korean War and was repeatedly on the verge of death. In his autobiography, The Garner Files, James talks about a case that could well be catastrophic:
Soldiers from China and North Korea, like our allies from South Korea, lived on a diet of fish heads, rice and garlic. One night I stood on guard and suddenly felt a faint smell coming from enemy positions. I did not see anything, but I realized that someone was there, and he was approaching. Smelling, I listened and still could hear them. It turned out that it was an enemy reconnaissance group, heading straight for our position. When I reported their approach to the command, they only approached the opposite side of the climb. We managed to prepare and were able to repel the attack.

The fact that James noticed approaching enemy soldiers probably saved the lives of many of his fellow soldiers, as well as his own. But in this case, one cannot say that he was just lucky. It's all about attentiveness and formed willpower .

Wiseman in his study notes that unlucky people often find themselves tense and alarmed. So he did another experiment to find out how excitement affects people.

He invited a group of people to watch a point moving across the screen, on which other, larger dots flash from time to time. Subjects noticed more and more points. He repeated the experiment with a 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 prevents us from noticing the various possibilities that appear in our lives.

You may have noticed that people talking about James's life often described him as a very relaxed guy:
James Garner, may the Lord rest his soul. One of my favorite actors. Always looked on the screen so calm. A real movie star.

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

He and his brothers grew up in a house where there were frequent cases of moral, physical and sexual abuse. It happened that his father made the children sing, and if they refused, beat him with a whip. His stepmother constantly beat children and even raped his 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 deal with 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, the nit-picking of the authorities on the set will seem to you a minor trifle.

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

Wiseman also discovered that successful people are struggling to try something new and are happy to meet new people.

Remember all the places James managed to work in?

And he personally knew everyone: members of the film crew, actors, as well as many people in the cities where the shooting took place. Gretchen Corbet, one of James’s partners in the Rockford Files series, recalls:
Everyone loved him - but he was worried about not only about 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 did not become so after he became famous. It has always been so.
I happened to deal with the famous three - Henry Fonda, Johnny Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan - at the same time as a bodyguard, an errand boy and a mascot.
On the first day of rehearsals, Lloyd never even looked at the script. Everyone else taught 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 this?” He asked Nolan. “I hired Bumgarner,” Lloyd told him. After that, Fonda asked me to give him cues as well. I gladly agreed.

James considered himself an introvert . But this does not mean that he did not use every opportunity to make friends with someone. He gladly agreed to clean up the locker rooms of movie stars or to help them learn the roles, only to get closer to new people.

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

In another experiment, Wiseman asked his successful and unsuccessful subjects to describe a hypothetical situation in which each of them is in a bank where a robber breaks in, shoots a pistol and falls into his hand. Unlucky people complained that they were constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lucky people were happy - because the situation could have been much worse. One of the participants in the experiment, who considered themselves lucky, said: "I was lucky because he could have gotten into the head."

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

In one story, James talks about how he had to share a motel room with two other guys:
There were only two beds, so I slept on the floor. These two Marines did not go to bed all night, only moaned about how unhappy they were: this was their first Christmas away from home, and we were all just teenagers. I was completely calm on 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 invited to act in films.

But, back to the story of James Garner:
  • Paul Gregory was only one of a huge number of friends whom James did not tire of making. The name of his friend, printed in Newsweek, a sign in Hollywood and an empty 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 he can be called one of the most relaxed people that are generally found on earth. He is just happy that a terrible childhood is left behind.

Can you say that James Garner is more successful than us or you? May be. But only because he himself created his own luck.
At the beginning of my acting career, I had no idea what I was doing. I acted almost at random, hoping that I would be lucky.

PS. We recommend another useful article on the topic of self- development - 9 communication skills that any successful leader should possess .

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

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