When his seven years of wages in gold prove too heavy to carry easily, Hans trades the lump of gold for one thing after another until he arrives home empty-handed, but convinced he is a lucky man to be unfettered with encumbrances.

Just when 12-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers. Illustrations.

Good luck isn’t just chance—it can be learned and leveraged—and The Serendipity Mindset explains how you can use serendipity to make life better at work, at home—everywhere. Many of us believe that the great turning points and opportunities in our lives happen by chance, that they’re out of our control. Often we think that successful people—and successful companies and organizations—are simply luckier than the rest of us. Good fortune—serendipity—just seems to happen to them. Is that true? Or are some people better at creating the conditions for coincidences to arise and taking advantage of them when they do? How can we connect the dots of seemingly random events to improve our lives? In The Serendipity Mindset, Christian Busch explains that serendipity isn’t about luck in the sense of simple randomness. It’s about seeing links that others don’t, combining these observations in unexpected and strategic ways, and learning how to detect the moments when apparently random or unconnected ideas merge to form new opportunities. Busch explores serendipity from a rational and scientific perspective and argues that there are identifiable approaches we can use to foster the conditions to let serendipity grow. Drawing from biology, chemistry, management, and information systems, and using examples of people from all walks of life, Busch illustrates how serendipity works and explains how we can train our own serendipity muscle and use it to turn the unexpected into opportunity. Once we understand serendipity, Busch says, we become curators of it, and luck becomes something that no longer just happens to us—it becomes a force that we can grasp, shape, and hone. Full of exciting ideas and strategies, The Serendipity Mindset offers a clear blueprint for how we can cultivate serendipity to increase innovation, influence, and opportunity in every aspect of our lives.

Mexican Magic offers an overview of magic and spells from all across Mexico for daily use. Algunos nacen con estrella y otros estrellados. This dicho (saying) roughly translates to "Some are born with a star, while others are born starry." It refers to the Mexican belief that good luck is a matter of fate, something you are born with or not. Mexicans attribute their good or bad luck to a greater force, to God's will, even to the stars in the sky. Being born with a star is a blessing. While some gain their luck through fate, Laura Davila believes even more in faith, virtue, and purpose. While there are some people who are born with a natural gift for magic, there are many others for whom life itself pushed them toward using magic. The best brujos and magical people are not those who necessarily started off in perfect circumstances but those who looked at magic as a skill to be mastered. Mexican Magic shares this knowledge and offers an overview of magic from across Mexico. Spells are the focus of Mexican Magic. The book features magical recipes, spells, tips, and advice for a wide variety of intentions, including love, lust, sex, good luck, money, protection, commerce, gambling, justice, pregnancy, travel, education, and more. Although the spells may be practiced by anyone, their flavor is Mexican, as they are deeply rooted in Mexican folk beliefs and magic. Davila also shares direction on how to be a magical person and live a magical life, with examples given from some influential Mexican historical and spiritual figures.

From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, and what we can do about it How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy. Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones—and enormous income differences—over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways. But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year—more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, noncontroversial steps. Compellingly readable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.

If you think that some people are just born lucky, think again. Now, it is true that some people are exposed to more opportunity. The more exposure to opportunity, the more chances you have to turn it into luck. On the other hand, some people who are exposed to many more opportunities are not lucky because they do not take action. Others are exposed to a lot of opportunities, but they can't actually see the opportunity that is in front of them. Still another group of people do see the opportunity in front of them; they desperately would like to take action, but they are just not in a position in their life that allows them to grab it. Or at least that is what their mind is telling them. They feel they are lacking in the resources of, say, time or money to take action on opportunities. And then yet a whole other group of people does have the resources of time and money, but they refuse to act because of their fear. They are skeptical. It seems too good to be true or that good things like this just don't happen to them, so they choose to do nothing. In this book, we're going to address these patterns of behavior. Because the fact of the matter is, you already are lucky, you just aren't in touch with what you are capable of yet. When you reach the end of this book, you are going to have created a completely different idea about yourself and the luck you can create. You are going to feel empowered and lucky. We're going to go over the many different areas you can work on to increase your probability of luck. It's really pretty scientific. There are many ways to increase your luck. You are going to learn the exact formula to increase your luck. It's a no-fail system and it will work for you as it has worked for me and countless others.