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Dr Mike Yeadon's avatar

I second your recommendation to remember that though results aren’t guaranteed, you are responsible for the steps that help you be more likely to be successful. Belief in your ability to move your life in a good direction is sometimes called “internal locus of control”. This even affects your chances of encountering good luck, or rather, recognizing when opportunities come your way and seizing them.

Some people believe that life happens to them and there’s little they can do about it. That can be termed “external locus of control”. Often, such a person believes they’re not lucky.

This distinction is famously seen in elite sport. A golfer struck the ball on the tee and got a hole in one. An observer exclaimed about his luck. He replied, “The more I practice, the luckier I get”.

There’s something in the saying “If you think you can, you will. If you think you can’t, you won’t”.

It’s possible that there’s even more to it than practise and luck. A friend who is a surgeon noticed that his patients who went into surgery with a positive outlook tended on average to get better results than those who were negative about the procedure, but was going ahead through lack of alternatives.

A few years ago, I found myself in the position of needing a surgical correction for a rare condition that had emerged later in life than it commonly does. Surgery in later life, according to learned literature, was rarely successful. My friend went out of his way to explain his own experience to me (this was in a different field of surgery). By the time I was due to go to theatre, I had decided I was going to have a good outcome and told the surgeon & anaesthetist of my conviction. The next day everyone was surprised at how well I was doing & was discharged that afternoon. I still look back at this as a minor miracle.

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