The Elixir of Good Luck

On an earlier article I was talking about how I understood dubstep as being this type of electronic music where the musician takes a bunch of terrible sounds and puts them together as something that comes out amazing. And I started discussing that maybe that is the difference between some people, where there are those that take the worst things in their life and make the best of it. Well, in all honesty that is what this article is about, how there are those people out there that take the worst things and make the best out of it. In hindsight we sometimes call that good luck.

Take the following situation that almost everyone has been in, where they are out with their friend or friends and telling a story. Then they get to the end of their amazing tale of something incredible that has happened. Then one of their friends says that they have "Good Luck" with whatever happened. Well, there might just be some truth behind that statement, but there is also another really good explanation. See, in several recent scientific studies (one included in this link) it was found that people with "good luck" might also have a different outlook on life.

In the following article I've written, I've devised it into two different parts. In the first part, I just want to speak directly about optimism and how it affects good luck. In the second part, I wanted to briefly go over what they call optimistic thinking.
Optimism
The Elixir of Good Luck
On taking a study of hundreds of lucky people, they found that all of them had a fairly optimistic outlook on life. Basically, when given a situation that could be taken in several ways, the optimists would take as positive spin on it and try to make the best of what they had. In effect, they would end up doing something they might never have thought of, learn something that they would never have learned, or overall just had had something happen that seems quite astounding. And this simple principle is what I am naming this article after, which is the elixir of good luck.

My Experiences
I am not going to say that I have never had an experience that was just downright awful and I could not help but feel grim about the future. I know it has happened and I know that it will happen again. But one of the things I have been trying to do more and more often in my life is to take away what happened in that experience and see if the next time I can work out a better answer, a brighter outlook that will overall make my life that much more achieving. And in a short-term sense, I have.

Illinois Vacation Part 1:
Take for instance a few summers ago when I went on a trip to Illinois with my Mom to visit with my Grandmother. Now I am not saying there is anything wrong with visiting with my Grandmother, and bless her heart for the time I had to spend with her, but she lives in the most boring, middle-of-nowhere town that exists. To say the least, I was not excited to be back in central Illinois for this visit. But as we left for Illinois, my Mom knew I was not excited about going and decided to change-up the plans to make it better for me. In essence, that is the type of loving, caring mother I had. So she switched paths towards Illinois for a while and started driving North towards the Black Hills. In what was normally a day-long drive to the heart of Illinois, we turned into a two day drive and touched up on some amazing parts of the country I had not yet seen.

And the whole way there it was raining, but we did not care and instead embraced the storm because of all the beauty it brought out of the land. A lot of people do not think about this, but rain storms really bring out the natural colors that we have in our beautiful country. So we were driving through beautiful rolling hills of Wyoming, the yellow and browns of the grass flowing in the wind, and listening to the music we liked. We did not care that this was a much longer drive to Illinois, in fact we took it in for all it was worth.

Then we got to the Black Hills and what normally would have been a terrible day because of the rain showers, terrible in the sense that you cannot hike anywhere and you cannot do anything, we just brushed off and moved on. It turned out to be the best day we could have had. You see, rain has another affect on animals as well, for as we drove around the Black Hills we started to see buffalo, wild horses, coyotes, foxes, and just about any other animal you could imagine. It was quite impressive. Even to this day I still look back and think of what a wonderful time I had on the drive to Illinois to see my Grandmother.

Illinois Vacation Part 2:
I wanted to split this part off from the first because it actually happened a few days later. At any rate, as we were in Illinois and I was trying to find anything to keep my brain active and away form insanity, my Mother came up with yet another wonderful idea. She decided that what we really needed to do was go and hike in a part of the country I had not really been in yet. So she took me down into Indiana and we did some trails she had done back when she was a kid. I did not tell her I wanted to get out of there, but rather instead took in what she had to offer and ended up getting to see a really cool valley that only locals really knew about.

An important detail to this story is that I need to say that we did not want my Dad to know what we had planned next. So we switched over from using her credit card to pay for things and started using mine so that my Dad could not track us. In basics, it took us off the trackable grid that my Dad watches.

Later on that same expedition southwards, we ended up going to Mammoth Cave for the day. Now, my Mother knew I wanted to go to Mammoth Cave and that it was something that really interested me, but what she was scared of is how big the cave actually was. So we looked up tours of the cave and learned that the shortest one was two hours and the longest one was eight hours long. I hate to say it, but there was no way my Mom was going to last through anything longer than a few hours without a bathroom. But instead of freaking out about the whole bathroom situation, we came up with the idea to call and ask if bathrooms were somehow during the middle of the tour. Turns out, they are! So we ended up taking the six-hour long tour of the cave system, which was so awesome.

After the tour we were back in the gift shop, looking at all of the trinkets they had to offer. Now normally we are not enticed by any of this if it has no meaning, but my Mom was really attracted to this map of Mammoth Cave. So she purchased it and we threw it in the back of the car to take home. Well, when we got home a few days later and unloaded the car, I accidentally left the rolled-up, plastically wrapped map in the back of the car. And in all honesty, I should not have had to think about it too much because it only said Mammoth Cave on there in the smallest of writing, so to anyone looking in it just looked like a rolled-up poster.

My Dad found it and suddenly looked it over. Now remember, this was the smallest detail on the parts that he could see, but somehow he must have examined it forever to find where it said in tiny lettering Mammoth Cave. We were both in trouble. To this day my Mom and I still laugh about that, still joke about who left the map in the car and how we got caught. We do not see it negatively, we see it as a funny moment in our life where what went wrong was just as funny as if it went completely right.

San Francisco Vacation:
I know that both my friend Vicki and Nate will remember this trip, because they were the one I toured the city with while we were there. From the first day I arrived, it looked as if my expedition into the streets of San Fran were going to filled with problems. The weather report for all the days I was going to be in town was rain with no chance of sunlight, the flight was delayed, and some friends could not make it to the opening ceremonial dinner. But I think of all the trips I have ever taken, this is one where had we not have held out heads up and looked towards the good it would have felt like a terrible trip.

When I arrived it was slightly drizzling and already dark. I walked out of the airport and was fairly quickly picked up by my friends. They then told me they were on their way for dinner and one of my friends was not going to make it, oh and also they had never been to this place before. So we get to the restaurant, which to be honest looked like any small mexican restaurant you would expect, and ordered dinner. It was amazing and all of us loved our dishes. Then we all left to go back to their place in Walnut Creek.

The very next day was the big tour of the city and although spirits might have been running low because of the rain, we just slightly shifted plans to see what we could that was inside. Well, turns out it really did not matter because after that first night the rain stopped and it was just cloudy for the remainder of my stay. And even beyond that, I ended up seeing the smaller, less known sites in the city that are actually really cool. For instance, the Buena Vista Café. Go look it up, it's a historical landmark that is not as well known as some of the other things.

The Elixir Conclusion
So what I'm trying to say is maybe stop looking for the bad things in life, the darker side that we all walk through at some point, and start looking for the good things, the brighter light. And even if things are looking down, that is no reason to give up hope that something good cannot happen. If you want good luck, go make it and live it. The old saying, "Life is what you make of it," is not too far from the truth!