How To Increase Your Luck
A few weeks ago, I was driving my boyfriend home from Stanford, zooming down the left lane of the 101 with just a handful of cars driving alongside of us.
All of a sudden, a car that had been parked on the shoulder pulled out - without indicating, out of nowhere - directly in front of me, while going about a quarter the speed it should have been moving in order to merge on the highway. Within a split second, I slammed on the horn, hit the breaks, veered into the (luckily empty) lane next to me, and narrowly avoided a crash. A crash that would have been utterly devastating, that could have altered our lives.
As I gathered my breath and my wits, recovering enough to keep driving, all I could think about was how lucky we were. I kept muttering “I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful we’re okay,” both out loud and in my head.
Within a few days, I had already kind of… forgotten about the incident. This stroke of luck had become something that I had come to completely take for granted. When I think back on it, I feel so lucky; but it’s been wiped away from my awareness unless I consciously retrieve it.
How many other strokes of luck have we had that we don’t even know about? How can we notice our luck, and even potentially increase it? What do we do with our good luck?
There’s a whole body of research on luck, and I’m going to share the major findings with you today to help you to become luckier, to learn what luck does to us, and how we can share our luck with others.
The Four Ways To Increase Your Luck
While there is obviously a certain level of chaos and randomness associated with what happens to us, there is an element that we can control or influence to become luckier.
Professor Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire is the leading academic researcher studying luck. He’s spent his career seeking to understand the difference between lucky people and unlucky people, and discovered that there are very specific things that lucky people to do to increase their good fortune. Most importantly, he has also discovered that we can create more luck for ourselves through changing the way that we think and behave.
Increasing your luck isn’t about manifesting a vision or staying relentlessly positive or repeating what you want over and over again until it magically shows up. Just like we can consciously choose to put ourselves into a flow state, into a meditative state, or into a loving state, we can also put ourselves into a lucky state that then impacts our behaviors and thus, some outcomes.
Here are the four luck principles to live by:
#1: Look for - and jump on - opportunities
Lucky people have cultivated a particular skill in noticing and then taking advantage of opportunities. They tend to notice subtle opportunities and then find a way to take hold of them. Most people who describe themselves as lucky tend to be extroverted, optimistic, and most importantly, open-minded. By keeping a sense of curiosity alive and well at all times, you can see things that other people might miss. One of Wiseman’s studies found that lucky people smile twice as much and engage in more eye contact than unlucky people. That social interaction often leads to new opportunities for them.
One quick way to do this is to change up your daily routine and put yourself in new environments or new experiences. Another is to say yes to things that you would normally decline. As we get older, we tend to accumulate wisdom, which makes us feel as though we have the answers to life and that we know how it will unfold; by consciously adopting open-mindedness, we can try to stay more open to surprises and moments where our luck could change.
#2: Follow your gut
Lucky people listen to their gut feelings, and they act upon what they hear. They tune in and ask themselves how something feels, using any insights to inform their decisions. They also consciously work to strengthen that ability by testing their hunches, learning from them, and finding ways to ‘hear it’ more effectively, like through meditating or creating mental space.
#3: Expect good things
Lucky people expect that life will be full of good things. Because of that belief, they tend to put themselves ‘out there’ more, as they believe that they will get what they want and aren’t ashamed to ask for it. This translates into raising your hand for opportunities, asking for things you want, and advocating for yourself, all of which have very positive outcomes.
(If you’re having trouble feeling this, remember that luck is also all about perspective. Someone out there believes that you are the luckiest person alive. If you are having trouble seeing that right now, put yourself in their shoes and imagine what it would be like to look at your life with that kind of awe and thankfulness.)
#4: Find ways to turn bad luck into good
And when inevitably, bad things happen to them, lucky people find a way to turn it into a positive thing. They tell themselves how much worse it could have been, try to control what they can of the situation, and practice resilience skills to more effectively cope.
Wiseman took these four principles and turned them into a ‘Luck School’, teaching unlucky people how to turn their fortunes around. In total, 80% of people who attended said their luck had increased, and on average, they estimated their luck had increased by over 40%!
Wiseman’s experiments don’t stand alone as the only example of one’s mindset having extraordinary power: many studies have found that if you act as if something is true, it can bring about some of that truth. One famous experiment by Ellen Langer at Harvard brought eight 70 year-old-men from a nursing home into an environment designed to look exactly like their lives 20 years earlier. She instructed the men to pretend that they were 20 years younger. After a week, they showed improvements in strength, posture, memory, perception, cognition, hearing, and vision. Four independent volunteers looked at before & after experiment photos and rated those in the ‘after’ photos as an average of two years younger than in their ‘before’ photos. In her book, she writes that the men, some of whom had walked in to the study home needing canes, spent their last morning playing an impromptu touch football game on the front lawn.
There are obviously some very real limits to what your mindset can do; but your mindset can do an awful lot.
Unseen Luck
One aspect of your luck that you can’t control is one of the most influential upon your life’s outcome: the circumstances that you are born into. In America, this is an extremely urgent and tragic problem. Studies have found that the family we are born into, our birth order, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we attend, and our race and gender highly influence our outcomes in life. For example, one study found 74% of rich teenagers who score in the top quadrant in math earned a four year college degree; but only 41% of the poorest students with the same top math scores did so.
This ‘unseen luck’ promotes a horrible myth that only the worthy succeed. This myth is particularly exacerbated alongside of the American Dream’s argument that only hard work and talent are needed to get ahead, when in fact, there is so much that affects us that we do not have any conscious awareness of. Just like I had forgotten my stroke of luck in avoiding a car crash, so people tend to forget the luck that they benefitted from in life. I think it’s really important that we stay vigilant to this tendency to forget.
When we forget our fortune, our psychological biases make us start believing that everything good in our lives came about because of something special about us, rather than something special about our lucky birth circumstances. This then creates a feeling of superiority within people who have been the luckiest, and unfortunately, people from higher social economic classes have been found to be less attuned to other people’s suffering. Put together, you have a society where the born-lucky people can easily come to believe that they have earned their good fortune because of their talents, look down upon people who weren’t lucky and treat them with less compassion, and continue to perpetuate a myth that individual effort is the only thing that matters to success in life.
I think it’s really important to to practice gratitude for the external conditions that made our lives what they are. By doing so, we recognize that we are the beneficiaries of extreme good fortune and remember all of the things outside of us, that we had no control over that made it that way.
Proposing A Final Luck Principle
I want to add a final principle, a fifth, to Dr. Wiseman’s list: find a way to make others lucky.
Once you recognize how much good fortune has come your way, it becomes natural to want to find a way to increase the luck of others. Were you fortunate to attend an incredible school where you learned something special? Find a way to teach those things to others. Do you have a job that many people would dream of? Mentor others and help them to get there, too (here’s an incredible community that makes it easy to do so!) There are millions of ways you can make other people lucky.
Your guidance, your time, your presence, your expertise, or your kindness might be the luckiest thing that someone else receives, something that changes their life forever.
What would it look like if you tried to live your life in a way that made others luckier?