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All right, I know it's the end of the day, and you must be tired. Congratulations on sticking with it. How many of you have snuck over to the Science Museum? Every time I go out there, there's some small child having fun doing something I want to play with, and my talk exactly fits in this time slot, so I'll get going. But first, I want to recognize our sponsors; they help pay the bills. We can communicate and hang out online, but being here together is genuinely different. I want you to appreciate what it means to meet face-to-face, and they help make that happen, so good on them.
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Additionally, I am so grateful to the organizers. I don't have the event organization gene, so if this event works, it’s because of the incredible planning that goes into making it happen. I attend conferences fairly regularly and see how much they matter to our community and how much work it takes to pull one off. If you haven't thanked someone who seems like an organizer yet, please do it before you leave. Let them know how much you appreciate the work they've done. We want them to want to do this again next year!
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Now, it's a bit awkward, but I want us to do a quick activity. Look around and meet the people sitting near you. I'll give you about 30 seconds to introduce yourselves to one another.
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Okay, can I ask, am I too loud? Is this okay? When you're up here, it's hard to tell if you're loud enough or if everybody can hear. Please let me know if I drift from this.
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Alright, we're short on time. Oh my gosh, I am someone whose name you might know. For some of you, that's probably true. It's incredibly unlikely that my name would ever have had significant meaning, and I’ve been so lucky, which makes me wonder about you.
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Some people, when I ask if they feel lucky, reply that they have a black cloud of evil, bad luck following them around. If you're one of those people, I have good news for you. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from the UK, conducted a long-term study on luck. His findings were published in a paper titled "The Luck Factor," detailing four principles that lucky people use to generate good fortune. This means that luck can be, in a way, hacked. The first principle is to pay attention.
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Wiseman studied a group of people, asking them to self-select into those who considered themselves lucky versus those who did not. He conducted personality profiles to discern the differences between these groups. The lucky individuals share four key characteristics. First, they pay attention, meaning they focus outward rather than inward.
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There’s a famous experiment you might have heard of: participants were given a task to count photographs of a specific object in a newspaper. Lucky participants would notice the large message on the second page saying there were 43 images and would stop counting, while those focused only on counting missed it. They were too tunnel-visioned, concentrated on finding those photos.
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The next principle is to be open. Lucky people are in tune with their intuition; they tend to go with the flow. Interestingly, lucky people often do not expect to be lucky. Practicing luck appears to create self-fulfilling prophecies. The last principle is about interpretation. Lucky people interpret their experiences as being lucky.
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There’s a concept called counterfactual reasoning where people create stories to explain their realities. For example, if I were in a bank that got robbed, I could perceive it as bad luck or I could view it as an interesting experience that fortunately didn't harm anyone. This mindset significantly alters how one views their experiences.
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I first learned about this research years ago from a woman named Sarah May, who presented a talk at a conference. Shortly after that, I embarked on a bike trip through Spain. Our navigation was less than ideal, and we got lost every day. Throughout the experience, my partner and I would joke, "At least we’re improving our luck!" This perspective actually made the trip much more enjoyable.
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Taken together, these principles suggest that you can create your own luck. Wiseman found that when unlucky individuals were taught these principles, they reported experiencing more luck later on. Perhaps you’re already making your own luck! Being here today means you’re lucky; you got time off work and sponsors covered your attendance. That’s incredibly fortunate.
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I have some statistics I gathered from data provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, focusing on programming jobs, which can be a bit tricky to categorize. In 2017, I extracted jobs that included the word "computer" and removed those filtered by repair and maintenance to arrive at around 2.3 million programming jobs.”},{