So many people visit or write looking for that elusive “job for a foreigner” in the Philippines, or some other elusive ‘key’ that will unlock the door that is holding them back from moving to the Philippines, or getting out of debt and being able to ‘live large’ in the Philippines, or finding that all important Filipina sweetheart who is going to solve all the sad problems of man-woman relationships in their background, or … well you name it, they are a-looking.
Many times people leave no doubt that they think I am lucky because I m earning money without a job, because I already found my one-and-only Filipina, because both my wife and I can come and go from the Philippines or the US or most any other country we want to … and yes, I suppose they would be right if they call me lucky.
But I wasn’t born that way. Nor, did I just happen across a streak of good fortune that’s going to be slipped out from under me in a heart beat. And I don’t worry about black cats or walking under ladders or stepping on cracks the way so many do.
I wasn’t born lucky. I believe in God and I believe God has blessed me, but in my personal theology, I don’t thing God worries much about my income or my visa status. I think He pretty well leaves the ordinary working side of my life up to me. And I, in turn, spend quite a bit of my time making myself lucky.
Making myself lucky? “Oh no”, I hear some of you saying,”That can’t happen Dave, you are just deluding yourself.” Well, maybe so, life itself is sometimes just one big delusion, but I just came across this impressive article that pretty well proves, scientifically, what I already know to be true, personally.
Tune in to Lisa Hoover’s great article on Changing Your Own Luck by Changing Your Perspective
Think you have no control over how lucky you are in life? Psychologist Richard Wiseman says think again. Turns out you can learn to be a luckier person just by changing how you look at the world around you.
Wiseman studied the lives of 400 people over the course of 10 years and watched for any lucky breaks or chance encounters—both good and bad—they had along the way. He discovered that some people are prone to worse luck than others, but it may be possible to create your own good fortune by tweaking your perspective on things.
In interviews with the study’s volunteers, he realized that unlucky people are typically more anxious and tend to more hyperfocused on the specifics of a situation. Lucky people, on the other hand, are more laid-back and open to whatever opportunities present themselves.
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….
You can read the rest of the article, and I recommend you do, but everything that needs to be said has been said in the two places I have rendered in bold, above.
In my own experience with living in the Philippines, and in the experience of many of the folks I know who have also made the move, I find that the ‘lucky’ ones, including me, are the ones who made the best choices they could with the information available to them, and then went ahead and did it.
For example … people like to know about costs in the Philippines, and I publish a lot of information on that subject. But I often don’t publish a lot of information I have because people will hound me about how ‘current’ the info is, or even critique my information and that provided by others on third-party sites, complaining about prices that aren’t “current enough” to suit them, exactly as if they were paying for the data and complaining about poor quality work that had bene delivered to them.
I got news for you. If my electric bill information in July isn’t current enough for you in december of the same year, then you aren’t suited for living in the Philippines. You’d be much better off as an IRS auditor in the USA trying to niggle an extra nickel out of taxpayers who might have checked the wrong box.
I live in the Philippines in a large sense because the life here is more varied and less certain (another word for this is BORING) as life in the US. If you base your life on ‘certainties’ and “due diligence”, then the Philippines is certainly not the place for you … I predict you won’t be very “lucky”.
Most of you know I make money operating some web sites. Many of them are involved with selling something. In order to decide on a web site that you might want to establish that sells something, one of the first things you need to do is find out if people are buying.
I looked today on eBay for top items that people are buying, as I wanted to show a friend a way she could find potentially profitable “niches”. Among the top ten items … on eBay, mind you, a discount auction site … were two different versions of auto insurance, health insurance and something about an extended life insurance plan. Four out of the top ten things Americans were interested in buying were insurance for Christ’s sake. Blew my mind.
You want good luck, folks? Start thinking about the good things and making your own good luck instead of obsessing about how “other people” are “so lucky” while you spend your days buying and paying for products that lucky people don’t even need.
Try Professor Wiseman’s (and Dave’s) method for a few months and see if you own luck doesn’t seem to magically change. A famous saying about the future I’ve heard from several sources is, “The best way to live happily ever after is just to build your life that way and live it.”
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