Luck and a Growth Mindset

I came across these two snippets today reading an (otherwise unremarkable) series of articles on CNNMoney. You can see the original pages here and here.

First, on Luck:

Jason exemplifies the traits that British researcher Richard Wiseman ascribed to lucky people in a 2003 article called The Luck Factor: "They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."

In one experiment, Wiseman asked two groups of people - one who described themselves as generally lucky and one who said they were usually unlucky - to count the photographs in a newspaper. The unluckies spent several minutes flipping through and counting the photos. The lucky people got it in a few seconds. How? On page 2, Wiseman had inserted a message in giant headline type: "Stop counting - There are 43 photographs in this newspaper."

The lucky people, always on the lookout for unexpected good fortune, spotted it right away. The unlucky people, whose minds are closed to such signs, missed it completely.

Next, on an open mindset:

Dweck, the psychologist who studies growth mind-sets, created an experiment to demonstrate how persistence and the pursuit of knowledge leads to success. She posed a series of trivia questions to a group of people with fixed mind-sets and another with growth mind-sets.

After each answer, one and a half seconds passed before the participants were told whether they were right or wrong, and, if they were wrong, another one and a half seconds lapsed before they were given the correct response. Their brains were monitored with electrodes the entire time.

Dweck found that the people with fixed mind-sets cared a lot about whether they were right or wrong but not at all about what the right answer was. The growth-mind-set participants stayed interested until the correct answer was given, showing an interest in learning new information rather than in simply validating their intelligence.

The article went on to explain that only the people who were classified as "growth-mind-set" did any better on the test when it was given later. I thought the luck one was fascinating, but that they were both too interesting to not share.