In 2003 the book The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles was published. It was written by Richard Wiseman and based on his own study and experiment.
Wiseman wanted to investigate to what extent our success depends on luck: on strokes of chance, on being in the right place at the right time. In the end, Wiseman was able to show why some people are luckier than others, concluding that anyone can develop the ability to generate more luck for themselves.
To start his study, Wiseman explains, he placed adverts in newspapers and magazines to attract both people who felt very lucky and people who felt completely unlucky. Over ten years he analysed hundreds of people aged from 18 to 80.
Through a series of tests that we won’t go into in detail here, he concluded that the more educated a person was (basic intelligence), the luckier they were. But ultimately, lucky people generate their own good fortune through 4 basic principles.
Lucky people…:
- Are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.
- Make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition.
- Create self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations.
- Adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good luck.
Unlucky people don’t follow their intuition, because they don’t really trust themselves, and so they believe their intuition will lead them to a bad decision.
The same “feeling” that a lucky person calls a “hunch” usually tells an unlucky person they’re about to mess up.
Unlucky people tend to have fixed routines. They tend to do the same things and talk to the same people. They don’t introduce variety or diversity into their lives. They never leave their comfort zone, so even if they aren’t actually unlucky, it’s very hard for good luck to find them.
Lucky people tend to look on the bright side of negative situations. Dr Wiseman gives an example: they tend to think so positively that if they fall down the stairs and break an arm, they feel lucky, because they could have broken their neck.
But can we really learn to be luckier?
Wiseman’s experiment consisted of creating a kind of “luck school”, where he took the least fortunate people and taught them to think like the luckiest. He says that months later, 80% of the most “jinxed” participants felt lucky, having achieved many challenges they had never managed until then. Those people’s lives improved noticeably in every respect.
In the end, luck is also a matter of mindset and habits. As Warren Buffett said in his Bloomberg interview: “There’s a lot of chance in the way we come into the world. We don’t get to choose the womb we come out of, but once we’re out, you decide what kind of person you’re going to be, even if you have to work harder than others.”
- Sometimes we call good planning luck, and the lack of a plan or goal bad luck.
- We call the hours devoted to learning a skill luck.
- We call the result of sustained sacrifice and effort over days or years luck.
Further reading
- 15 habits and choices for success
- 7 things the world’s most successful people have in common
- 14 science-backed ways to be happier
Featured image: BDEngler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
