How many people have coveted their neighbour’s big premium bond win? How many have thought how lucky someone is for winning big on the National Lottery? How many, do you think, have just wished that they had more good luck in their lives? Eight people have had all these thoughts. What these eight people don’t realise is that the quicker they use up their good luck, the nearer they are to having a shed load of bad luck. What they also don’t realise is that once they have maxed out on good luck, their ultimate outlook is not what they expect… In more ways than they care to imagine! Playing an on-line game, the eight finalists don’t know that if they lose the game, they die. Something else they don’t know is that if they win the game, they die. Either way, they’re dead... Born in Sheffield in 1950, Bill is now retired and lives with Sheila, his wife of over fifty-three years. In 1966, at the age of 15½, he joined the army and enjoyed many overseas postings, with tours in Northern Ireland, France, Cyprus, Kenya, Iran, Bermuda and the USA. He culminated his Army career in 1977 as an instructor at his regiment’s depot. Since leaving the army, Bill has been a television and film extra and has been employed as a surveyor, lecturer, technical adviser to an insurer and, just prior to retirement, as a self employed health and safety consultant. Bill is a published author and is also a published music composer and arranger.

There are people who seem to lead a charmed life. They seem to almost stumble into success, They have opportunities open up for them all the time. Things are handed to them, they win in the stock market, they find their dream job, and get married to their ideal partner. These are perpetually unlucky people. Most of us are somewhere between these two extremities. We may never really know why, or whether there is something to be done. There is! That's why this book was written.

“I don't know when I've been so wowed by a new author” –Chip Health, co-author of The Power of Moments and Switch A talented journalist reveals the hidden patterns behind what we call "luck" -- and shows us how we can all improve outcomes despite life’s inevitable randomness. "Do you believe in luck?" is a polarizing question, one you might ask on a first date. Some of us believe that we make our own luck. Others see inequality everywhere and think that everyone’s fate is at the whim of the cosmos. Karla Starr has a third answer: unlucky, "random" outcomes have predictable effects on our behavior that often make us act in self-defeating ways without even realizing it. In this groundbreaking book, Starr traces wealth, health, and happiness back to subconscious neurological processes, blind cultural assumptions, and tiny details you're in the habit of overlooking. Each chapter reveals how we can cultivate personal strengths to overcome life’s unlucky patterns. For instance: • Everyone has free access to that magic productivity app—motivation. The problem? It isn’t evenly distributed. What lucky accidents of history explain patterns behind why certain groups of people are more motivated in some situations than others? • If you look like an underperforming employee, your resume can't override the gut-level assumptions that a potential boss will make from your LinkedIn photo. How can we make sure that someone’s first impression is favorable? • Just as people use irrelevant traits to make assumptions about your intelligence, kindness, and trustworthiness, we also make inaccurate snap judgments. How do these judgments affect our interactions, and what should we assume about others to maximize our odds of having lucky encounters? We don’t always realize when the world's invisible biases work to our advantage or recognize how much of a role we play in our own lack of luck. By ending the guessing game about how luck works, Starr allows you to improve your fortunes while expending minimal effort.

Max Gunther's lost classic, now in a new Classics edition. Some people think you're either born lucky or not. But what if you could actively get lucky? As Max Gunther shows in this page-turning classic, some people really are luckier than others - and not by accident. Lucky people arrange their lives in characteristic patterns. They tend to position themselves in the path of onrushing luck; they tend to go where events are moving fastest and where they can find their lucky break Lucky people take risks but not silly ones. They stick with a cause, a job, or a partner, but not when all hope is lost. In short, they move with life, not against it. This book gives you 13 different techniques by which you can discover and take advantage of life's good breaks, while minimising the effects of its bad ones.

Is luck just fate, or can you change it? A groundbreaking new scientific study of the phenomenon of luckand the ways we can bring good luck into our lives. What is luck? A psychic gift or a question of intelligence? And what is it that lucky people have that unlucky people lack? Psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman put luck under a scientific microscope for the very first time, examining the different ways in which lucky and unlucky people think and behave. After three years of intensive interviews and experiments with over 400 volunteers, Wiseman arrived at an astonishing conclusion: Luck is something that can be learned. It is available to anyone willing to pay attention to the Four Essential Principles: . Creating Chance Opportunities . Thinking Lucky . Feeling Lucky . Denying Fate Readers can determine their capacity for luck as well as learn to change their luck through helpful exercises that appear throughout the book. Illustrated with anecdotes from the lives of the famous such as Harry Truman and Warren Buffett, The Luck Factor also richly portrays the lives of ordinary people who have been extraordinarily lucky or unlucky. Finally Dr. Wiseman gives us a look into "The Luck School" where he instructs unlucky people and also teaches lucky people how to further enhance their luck. Smart, enlightening, fun to read, and easy to follow, The Luck Factor will give you revolutionary insight into the lucky mind and could, quite simply, change your life.

This lovely, accomplished, and wryly humorous debut picture book reminds readers not to believe everything they hear. Four animals make their way to the lake, hoping they’ll be lucky enough to catch some fish for dinner. To their dismay, they arrive at the pier at same time, and each worries the others will wreck their day—the stork thinks he’s got bad luck now that the black cat has crossed his path, the cat worries that the raccoon will steal all his fish, the raccoon fears getting too close to the frog and his warts, and the frog hopes the stork doesn’t deliver any babies on the already too-crowded pier. But as this gentle, funny, and thoroughly satisfying picture book makes clear, it’s a mistake to judge others too quickly.

2010 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing (New York Public Library) 2012-2013 Show Me Readers Nominee List (Missouri) 2013 Arkansas Diamond Primary Book Award 2010 Smithsonian Magazine Notable Books for Children Like so many people during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Marshall Loman's dad has lost his job. There's little money, but there are plenty of beans-in fact, Ma cooks them for supper every single night! Beans start looking better when Marshall sees the contest posted in the furniture store window. HOW MANY BEANS ARE IN THE JAR? WIN THIS BRAND NEW SEWING MACHINE! Ma needs that sewing machine-but how can Lomans possibly guess right? Then Marshall remembers something he learned in arithmetic class. Becky Birtha's engaging story, based on her grandmother's memories of Depression years in the African American community, is illustrated by Nicole Tadgell's expressive paintings.

Change Your Luck and Live a Charmed Life! What if you could create your own luck? What if living a charmed life—being lucky in love, lucky in money, lucky in your chosen work—was within your control? The good news is that it’s all entirely possible...when you know how! In Conscious Luck, New York Times bestselling authors Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline share eight Secrets that will allow you to intentionally change your fortune. Instead of hoping and wishing that luck will come your way, let Conscious Luck show you how to seize control of your destiny and create the dazzling life of your dreams. This powerful step-by-step program, which includes practical techniques, inspiring true stories, and the authors’ personal journeys, will lead you to greater freedom and abundance. The Secrets—four core shifts and four daily practices—teach you how to: · plant the seeds of luck in your own psyche · remove unlucky programming (including lifting “curses”) · move at your Essence Pace · practice Radical Gratitude, and much more. Based on decades of the authors’ trailblazing work, this unique and highly effective toolkit offers a surefire way to transform your life.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

After his mother tells him to stop playing video games and go outside, a young boy tries to catch the last leaf on a tree, thinking it will bring him luck.