It is his write up of an 8 year scientific study into what luck actually is. He identifies 4 (I think) traits of the personality which add up to making a "lucky" person. He investigated thing such as whether people are born with it, can catch it, can change it....
The traits are along the lines of:
- relaxed attitude
- trusting your intuition
- optimism and perseverance
- ability to turn bad luck into good luck
It demonstrates that if you consider yourself unlucky then all is not lost. By changing your attitude and/or behaviour then you can become "lucky".
One of the most interesting things I took from the book was that lucky people tend not to bang on about things when they aren't going so well, and unlucky people moan all day long when even minor things happen to them. The upshot being that when a good thing happens to a lucky person the unlucky people say "oh my god, why do good things always happen to you?" when in actual fact both experience the same amount of bad things, it's just that a lucky person doesn't draw attention to it and thus is deemed by the unlucky person to be not experiencing them at all.
TV personality Derren Brown did a tv show here in the UK that felt like it was based on Richard Wiseman's book chapter by chapter. He got a whole town in Yorkshire tricked into believing luck was acquirable and then picked on an "unlucky" butcher he'd identified as not having the traits necessary to be "lucky" and tried to get him to change his attitudes, the finale being him betting his life savings on the roll of the dice.
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