conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Increase, Success, Luck with the genre: Health, Fitness & Dieting, Psychology & Counseling?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Luck Factor'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Luck Factor
  Seen in this way – as derived from objective data not consciously known – a hunch becomes less mysterious. Conrad Hilton's hunch about that hotel bid, for instance, could have welled up from great stores of facts in the recesses of his mind. He had been in the hotel business throughout his adult life. Ever since he bought his first hotel as a young man in Texas, he had been gathering knowledge about the business: millions of facts, many more than his conscious mind could juggle all at once. Moreover, in bidding on that Chicago hotel, he undoubtedly knew much about the sellers and about the competing bidders – knew it, again, without being able to articulate it in the form of specific facts. When his rational brain assembled some facts and based a bid on them, the other part of his mind rummaged in a huge dark warehouse of other facts and concluded that the bid was too low. He trusted the hunch, and it was magnificently right.
  Dolores N.'s hunch about Ted must have arisen in a similar way. The hunch may have been based on observed details that her thinking brain considered trivial: some things Ted said, perhaps, or certain mannerisms, or a shifting of the eyes in response to certain questions or overtures by her. These details, dismissed as unimportant, were forgotten – but not forgotten. They sank from conscious awareness to another level. Down there, they were processed and examined and put together with other facts. The result was a hunch that whispered, "Something isn't true."
  As for C. C. Hazard, like all good salesmen he is a gregarious soul who spends his days talking to people, listening to them, observing them. He makes contact with scores of people in an average day, thousands a year. His conscious mind doesn't retain all the personal impressions that he takes in, but the other part of his mind does. It stores them, sorts them, adds them gradually into a single cumulative impression. And finally, as in 1968, it produces a seemingly mysterious hunch: "... a nervous quality in the air... terrible times ahead... "
  This not-quite-conscious way of processing data used to be thought mainly feminine and was called "woman's intuition." A few years ago Vogue magazine rounded up some psychiatrists and others for a symposium on this elusive subject. Their consensus was that the hunching talent is not innately stronger in either sex, but that, until recently, it was stronger in women because of the way society was built. Men prided themselves on what they considered their superior reasonableness. As a corollary, they suppressed feelings. The emotional, the mystical, the vague: these were felt to be feminine or, at best, not powerfully masculine. Women, most of whom had small chance to use their thinking brains in the old societies (and were often ridiculed when they did), felt the need to show they were superior to men in other ways. One such way was "woman's intuition."
  Thus did each sex jockey for position by expressing what were felt to be its special qualities. The man demanded objective facts because that was a fine masculine attitude. The woman, by demonstrating her hunching skill, preserved her "mystery" and her measure of power over the man. Both sexes agreed that intuition was feminine because both profited from the notion. Some remnants of this sex distinction are still alive today, but it seems unlikely that they will last long.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Almost anything you can do to avoid this paralysis of endless fussing will help you. This is why it won't necessarily do you any harm and may, potentially, be tangibly useful if you hold a minor mystical belief – what others might call a "superstition."
  In all modern industrial nations, of course, it is fashionable to deride superstitious ideas. This derision is an admired intellectual stance, from Moscow to Los Angeles. The so-called Age of Aquarius, which supposedly dawned in the 1960s, is said to be making people more tolerant of mystical notions – but if it is, the increase in tolerance so far seems confined (justifiably in many respects) to certain rather small segments of society. In most places it is not a good idea to admit that you believe in lucky numbers or launching salt over your shoulder, unless you grin while speaking to show you know you're dumb. But perhaps such beliefs – at least, the more ordinary ones, leaving behind the clear extremes of crystals, cards and the occult – are not so silly after all. Let's look at the practical uses of superstition.
  When I began talking to the lucky and unlucky many years ago, a puzzling fact became apparent to me very quickly. With exceptions, spectacularly lucky people are superstitious. Getty was among them. "Yes, I have a tidy little superstition," he told me when I asked him, though he offered no details. Leonard Bernstein has a pair of lucky cufflinks that he invariably wears when conducting. Truman Capote grows uncomfortable when he sees an ashtray with more than three cigarette butts in it and spends considerable energy keeping ashtrays emptied. Arlene Francis always wears a certain pendant when appearing before an audience, and if it doesn't go with her costume, she wears it concealed. With Zsa Zsa Gabor it's a ring given to her as a child.
  A list of famous astrology buffs would fill a fair-sized telephone directory. President Grover Cleveland consulted an astrologer regularly. So did J. Pierpont Morgan. So did at least two presidents of the New York Stock Exchange, Jacob Stout and Seymour Cromwell. Cornelius ("Commodore") Vanderbilt was interested not only in the stars but also in ghosts. He consulted spirit mediums, who raised ghosts from whom Vanderbilt got tips about the future.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We have noted before that some lessons of the Work Ethic are lessons in the cultivation of bad luck. This one is perhaps the worst. It is so obviously a fallacy that one wonders why it has survived so long. Hoffman, however, like many other unlucky people, apparently wove it tightly into his general philosophy of life. He believed he was good at playing the horses. He probably was good. Certainly he gave himself plenty of practice. But he had so much faith in his skill that he belittled the element of chance. It was a much bigger element than he was willing to admit. It did him in.
  Never ignore that possibility of bad luck. It is always there. Doubt your own grip on events. Be prepared for them to slide from your grasp at any time, in any direction, with any result.
  We have looked at Murphy's Law and Mitchell's Law separately. Now let's put them together and see what we have. Murphy's Law counsels us not to depend too much on luck, for things are as likely to go wrong as right. Mitchell's Law counsels us not to depend too much on our own control over events, for that control is less good than we sometimes like to think.
  That is the pessimism of the lucky. Buried amid the pessimism, however, is a particular little piece of optimism. For if bad luck can wrench control from our grasp, so can good luck. We looked at this pleasing possibility in studying the audentes fortuna juvat phenomenon. The bold are ready to grab a piece of good luck when it drifts by, even if it means going off in a new, unplanned direction. They don't try to control their lives so rigidly that they ignore lucky breaks lying off the main track.
  You might as well. Life is slippery no matter how you handle it. Perfect control is an illusion. Good luck.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We have noted before that some lessons of the Work Ethic are lessons in the cultivation of bad luck. This one is perhaps the worst. It is so obviously a fallacy that one wonders why it has survived so long. Hoffman, however, like many other unlucky people, apparently wove it tightly into his general philosophy of life. He believed he was good at playing the horses. He probably was good. Certainly he gave himself plenty of practice. But he had so much faith in his skill that he belittled the element of chance. It was a much bigger element than he was willing to admit. It did him in.
  Never ignore that possibility of bad luck. It is always there. Doubt your own grip on events. Be prepared for them to slide from your grasp at any time, in any direction, with any result.
  We have looked at Murphy's Law and Mitchell's Law separately. Now let's put them together and see what we have. Murphy's Law counsels us not to depend too much on luck, for things are as likely to go wrong as right. Mitchell's Law counsels us not to depend too much on our own control over events, for that control is less good than we sometimes like to think.
  That is the pessimism of the lucky. Buried amid the pessimism, however, is a particular little piece of optimism. For if bad luck can wrench control from our grasp, so can good luck. We looked at this pleasing possibility in studying the audentes fortuna juvat phenomenon. The bold are ready to grab a piece of good luck when it drifts by, even if it means going off in a new, unplanned direction. They don't try to control their lives so rigidly that they ignore lucky breaks lying off the main track.
  You might as well. Life is slippery no matter how you handle it. Perfect control is an illusion.