In Smile or Die: How Postive Thinking Fooled America & The World, Barbara Ehrenreich writes:
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
This same “ideological force”, positive thinking, wreaks havoc on people’s ability to pursue luck. The number one behavioral change that is required to pursue luck is to “pursue more, to act”. Postive thinking is neither pursuit or action, rather its a single-track use of your thoughts, or even worse its a thought process that’s akin to a broken record.
If nothing is happening and you feel frozen in Limbo then do something different, something odd to create an opportunity. If an opportuntity comes you way act fast and without fear to seize it. If misfortune comes your way then counter-attack aggressively or run in a direction far away from the misfortune.
When people rely upon deliberate positive thinking for a solution to Limbo, Opportunity or Misfortune (the three contact states of the Pursuit of Luck) they are avoiding pursuit, they are avoiding action.
Also, it takes an enormous amount of energy to think like a record stuck on the song “Think Positive”. So forget positive thinking, use this same brain energy to act.