Be Luckier in Life: 10 Simple Secrets That Will Change Your Future
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About this ebook
The Best Way to Improve Your Luck...Buy this book!!
Many thoughtful people would dispute the notion that you can take action to increase the likelihood of creating more luck in your life.
Those people are wrong.
By studying the life-lessons of some of the world’s most successful people, including Starbucks' Founder Howard Schultz and basketball star Senator Bill Bradley, and distilling their essence into a key group of tried-and-true behaviors, this book provides proven strategies which will cause better opportunities and luckier outcomes to occur in your life. Once you learn these secrets, you will learn how to attract good luck and channel it to achieve your goals.
The luckiest people have learned how to:
*Carry the right toolkit of people skills, character traits and even good taste to ensure they are exposed to lucky opportunities.
*Start every opportunity with a goal in mind, and work backwards to ensure they make the progress needed to achieve their ambitions.
*Not simply ‘communicate’ but to profoundly connect with others.
*Reframe setbacks to turn them into ‘successes’ that cause new and even more powerful opportunities to come into their lives.
Once you read this book, you will see that luck isn’t simply an unpredictable ‘bolt from the blue’ that happens for some people by accident. You will know how to channel your luck-producing behaviors into a strategy and way of being that will help you achieve success in every part of your life.
Even if you have never before considered yourself ‘lucky,’ you will learn you don’t have to be among those ‘chosen’ for good luck.
Buy this book and begin making luck for yourself.
Craig I. Forman
Craig I. Forman is an entrepreneur and technology executive who lives in San Francisco. He has been at the forefront of the changing media landscape, leading organizations in print, interactive TV, mobile and next-generation advertising and e-commerce companies. He created the business strategy for EarthLink's $1 billion consumer business and also led Yahoo's News Division to #1 in traffic, ahead of CNN. Forman currently sits on the board of YellowMedia (TSX: YLO) and McClatchy newspapers (NYSE: MNI) as well as several successful software, content and telecom startups. He was part of the founding team to take search engine pioneer Infoseek public. Early in his career, Craig was a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent and bureau chief in Japan. Book is also available in print on Amazon.
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Be Luckier in Life - Craig I. Forman
Be Luckier in Life:
10 Simple Secrets That Will Change Your Future
Craig I. Forman
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2013 Craig I. Forman
License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword
1. Create Opportunity from a Setback
2. Be Clear Who You Are...And Who You Aren't
3. Use your Lucky Toolkit
4. Harness The Power Of Attraction
5. Don't Communicate, Connect!
6. Swing For The Fences!
7. Build Great Character
8. Don't Quit!
9. Have A 'Light' Touch
10. Gain Perspective
About the Author
DEDICATION
For Cecile and Elliot, who make me luckier in life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the interviews on which the book is based were conducted by members of the editorial team at MyPrimeTime Inc. during the turn of the millennium, when I was chief executive. I am indebted to the individuals who contributed so much to the company, including Donald Van de Mark and Diane Ettelson, for the substance of those interviews and much else besides.
Much of the journey of discovery reflected in this book has come through the constant support, drive and energy of my MyPrimeTime cofounder Helen Whelan. She initiated the adventure of MyPrimeTime, and constantly provided the energy, support and rigor that have guided this book. Her generosity in allowing portions of the interviews created and maintained by her and her company is unsurpassed, and she has my unending gratitude and respect.
George Anders was a thoughtful editor and tremendous supporter of my work, as he has been for three decades. For his help with this project and many others, I want to say thank you. Thanks are also due to my good friend and esteemed colleague Gordon Crovitz, who is a constant source of suggestions and inspiration.
I am also indebted to many people my colleagues and I have interviewed. I would particularly like to mention Ray Chambers, Karen Elliott House, Peter Kann, Norman Pearlstine, Charles Schwab and Ann Winblad. Two people stand out even in this list of luminaries: Senator Bill Bradley and entrepreneur Howard Schultz were far more generous with their time and support than they had any reason to be.
The lessons I have learned from that generosity are also reflected in this book, and I want to thank them. While any errors are mine, the luck you may achieve as a result of this book is due to them.
FOREWORD
It starts with a smile, always. Over the past 30 years, I've spent time with Craig Forman in more cities than either of us can count. We've mapped out business strategies in London and New York; we've shared home-cooked meals with each other's families in California; we even careened through Luxembourg together in an utterly mad attempt to discover the inner truth of the European steel industry. No matter what the occasion, within minutes, Craig is flashing his famous grin and rolling into some marvelous new story.
Craig's stories are funny. They are warm-hearted. They embrace the absurdities of modern-day life — and still manage, somehow, to find hope that it will all be better tomorrow. He tells them with an infectious brio, jabbing his fingers into the air, raising his pitch into a yelp of incredulity, and then whispering the key insight in a low voice that demands the closest attention. The narratives are so entertaining that it's only afterward that I realize how skillfully Craig picks apart each moment for the larger lessons. He isn't just a story-teller. He's a teacher, a coach, a mentor.
Nearly a decade ago — back in the summer of 2003 — I was excited to see this book start to take shape. Craig had just finished the bittersweet stage of his career defined by MyPrimeTime, and he was ready to reflect on what he had learned from that brave adventure. We talked on the phone quite a bit that summer. All his ideas for the book sounded promising. And then, as new career opportunities took shape for Craig, completing the book began to fade into the background. After a few years, I wasn't sure what the project's fate would be.
So I was thrilled to hear not long ago that the book was coming back to life. In fact, some weeks later, Craig called to let me know that it was finished. Finished! Somehow, all the boulders had been moved out of the way. Sitting in a cottage in France, Craig had figured out how to share a career's worth of insights about success and setbacks, goals and grit. He had assembled a remarkable, hands-on guide to the ways we can tame the mysteries of luck so that they work to our advantage.
Human creativity works that way. Some our best work happens very quickly. We seize upon an inspiration, and within a short time, we've conjured up a speech, a chapter, a painting or a computer program that transcends all the frustrations and compromises of everyday work. Yet it's just as common for great work to take near eternities to reach completion. We struggle over the most challenging territory of our careers, not sure how to succeed. We cope with many, many false starts and errant drafts. We carry Albert Camus' maxim — the struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart
— to lengths we never thought possible. And then, at last, the day brightens and the project at last is everything we hoped it would be.
Be Luckier in Life
is a book that draws its strength from both those models. Craig's skillful completion of the book is a tour de force. But it comes about only because he had the patience and discipline to reflect deeply on what he has learned over the years. The book's passages about turning dreams into reality, and about the importance of lightening up, are showcase examples of the ways that wisdom deepens with the passage of time.
I'm especially fond of the sections that draw on Craig's exchanges with Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. Instead of bragging about his biggest achievements, Schultz pulls the curtain back on the doubts and frustrations along the way. His candor —and his ability to prevail —is inspiring. Throughout the book, Craig skillfully weaves in insights from the likes of former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and many other achievers who help us realize how to control our luck and open new horizons. Enjoy the chapters that follow. If you know Craig already, you'll be delighted to find his zest, his optimism, his insights and his warm-hearted tone on every page. If this is your first introduction to Craig, you're in for a treat. And for those of us who knew Craig in the early 1980s, before he rose to great heights as a digital-media executive, I'd like to close with a simple message: Welcome back to the community of writers, friend! It's good to see your byline again.
- George Anders
1. CREATE OPPORTUNITY FROM A SETBACK
Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
- George Bernard Shaw
* Success in life is not simply a matter of chance. There are steps you can take to create more luck in your life.
* Studying the luck-creating behaviors of the world's most successful people is one way of learning how to create more luck in your life.
* These techniques will shake up your self-perception and boost your energy, propelling you to take a fresh approach to your motivations, goals and life.
Life can be exhilarating, and it can be the opposite. Between those two extremes, people can find their lives bountiful, or empty. Yet we all know individuals who appear to be lucky in life — people who find joy more often and overcome pain more quickly, who discover new paths to success even when failure seems unavoidable.
How do they do it? Is their success simply a matter of chance? Or are there lessons that you, too, can learn that will create more luck — and success — in your life?
I believe the answer to the last question is a resounding yes. I wrote this book to show how authentic stories of good luck — from famously successful people and from prominent failures, including my own experiences with both — can teach us how to unlock the energy and circumstances that will create more luck in all of our lives. By understanding this kind of luck — the sort that can transform lives — and by applying these techniques, I believe you, too, will make more luck in your life.
Can there really be a secret system
for creating luck — and if there is one, why haven't more people cracked the code until now?
That's a fair question. I believe life's journey offers certain clues to an answer that is hidden in plain sight. Some of these lessons, which I write about in this book, have been adopted over the years by our smartest ancestors, and have become a kind of inculcated wisdom and personal philosophy of how to lead a luckier life.
Putting it all together is the key to unlocking more luck in your life. My experience is that by learning and adopting the right traits, attitudes and habits, anyone can create the sort of luck that will make her healthier, wealthier and wiser. My system can help you have the right mental outlook and approach, the background to make a proper analysis, a foundation for creating enduring