brains, luck and self-perception

Believing that you can get smarter makes you smarter
Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) performed an experiment:

They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed — a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence

I guess this has to be scored as a win for the 'believe in yourself' and the 'power of positive thinking' advocates. It's a field of self-help gurus and snake-oil salesmen, but there it is: the scientific data. It's time to put aside prejudice and concede that maybe there is perhaps some credibility in the idea. Data trumps intuition.
In a related vein, there is a researcher in Britain, Richard Wiseman, who believes that luck is real. He doesn't mean in a metaphysical sense, and he's not talking about winning at roulette. Rather, he describes luck as a personality characteristic. If you believe you're lucky, then you are more attuned to random opportunities in your environment. You spend more cognitive effort looking for them and have more sophisticated schemas for them, and therefore more will come to your attention.
With all these random opportunities, you'll conclude that you're a lucky person, just as you thought! Wiseman has written a book on the topic called The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles where he outlines the characteristics of the "lucky" personality. An interesting idea, isn't it?