Found that awesome image on Adam's Tumblr. :)

And now I've made that the image of my Karma stash: http://pandawhale.com/ifindkarma/karma

I also believe in the central premise of your article: Stress makes us less creative.

Stress generally has two effects: it makes us respond with the familiar or, at the extremes, it paralyzes us. When you think about it, both of these make some sense from a defensive position.

The problem is stress is not a thing you can just avoid, it is a reaction that originates inside you.

There are ways to reduce stress overall.

When I used to train in Krav Maga, they did an excellent job of solving the stress problem (though it takes work.) It was basically a two-pronged approach:

-Adapt to the stress response through repeated exposure. Basically, make scary things no longer scary by frequently putting yourself in that situation. Similar to CBT.

-Train yourself diligently so your stress response is the correct response.

Your links remind me of something I tell myself every day:

Life is like business. It's 20 percent what happens to you, and 80 percent how you respond.

Wow, the blog post that I wrote with that title has been viewed 20k times: http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/life-is-like-business-its-20-percent-what-hap

This connects nicely with the research on happiness. Once you set aside the 50% of happiness that is due to genetics, you're left with the other two main factors: your life circumstances (largely out of your control) and your actions/attitude (totally under your control).

Guess which one is more important?

-Life circumstances: 10%

-Actions/attitude: 40%

I'm amazed at how often the 80/20 rule shows up.

I think this also explains why lucky people have certain attitude traits in common: optimism, intuition, openness, resilience.

It's because they've trained themselves to react well.

Does training yourself to have the correct response to stress make you more lucky? I think so.

...which led me to read "Increase Your Luck Surface Area" again: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area

Luck is largely about embracing and encouraging opportunity.