The Luck Equation: 4 Principles + 5 Strategies = A Luckier You

Jun 24 (edited) in Self Improvement & Motivation

Is it possible to actively become luckier in life? According to psychology professor Richard Wiseman's book "The Luck Factor," the answer is a resounding yes. Based on Wiseman's extensive research involving over a thousand participants, this guide will explore the four principles of luck and five evidence-based techniques for incorporating more luck into your life.

The Four Principles of Luck

1. Create, Notice, and Act Upon Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are open to opportunities and make the most of them. They tend to be:

Flexible in their approach to goals
Willing to try new things and figure out what works
More outgoing, exposing themselves to more opportunities
Relaxed, allowing them to notice things in their "peripheral vision"
Open to new experiences

In contrast, unlucky people often focus on excessive planning and seeking certainty before making decisions.

2. Trust Your Intuition and Gut Feelings

Lucky people tend to trust their intuition when making decisions. In Wiseman's studies:

90% of self-identified lucky people trusted their intuition
80% said intuition played a crucial role in their career decisions

While intuition may seem mystical, psychologists view it as our subconscious brain processing patterns and data that our conscious mind can't fully comprehend. So when you get a bad feeling or a bad vibe about something, that's like your subconscious integrating tons of signals into that particular vibe check. You can use that seriously as an alarm bell to not do something. Or if you get a really good feeling about something, you can use that as a good signal to proceed.

3. Expect Good Fortune

Lucky people are optimists, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They continue in the face of failure. The reason why optimism and high expectations tend to lead to you being luckier and more successful in life is because of something called the Pygmalion effect, demonstrated in a 1968 Harvard study:

Teachers were told certain students were "late bloomers" based on a fake test
These randomly chosen students ended up performing better due to changed teacher expectations

The idea here is that if you have an external or internal label that you are bad at something, or you have low expectations, that's actually going to contribute to your performance. This has been repeated in many studies, so generally being a little bit more optimistic in our thinking can help us become luckier and more successful.

4. Turn Bad Luck into Good Fortune

This is probably the most important principle. Lucky people are extremely resilient. When bad things happen, they bounce back. Obviously, no one is lucky all the time, but what lucky people do is bounce back from failure.

Wiseman shares a story about a guy who fell down the stairs and broke his leg. Let's call him Mr. Lucky. When Wiseman said to Mr. Lucky, "I bet you don't consider yourself quite so lucky now," Mr. Lucky surprised him by saying that the last time he went to the hospital, he fell in love with a nurse, and now they've been happily married for 25 years! He said that breaking his leg was the single best thing that had ever happened to him.

It's this idea that people who consider themselves lucky tend to bounce back and be more resilient when bad things happen in life. There's a nice quote from Martin Seligman, the founder of the positive psychology movement, where he wrote, "Optimists endure the same storms in life as pessimists, but they weather them better and emerge from them better off."

Now that we've covered the four principles that separate lucky people from unlucky people, let's talk about five evidence-based tips that Wiseman shares in the book for how to incorporate more luck into your own life.

Five Evidence-Based Techniques for Increasing Luck

1. Create a Luck Diary

We saw that the first luck principle is to create lucky opportunities for yourself. But to do this, we need to get better at noticing opportunities that could generate positive experiences and open doors. This is what the idea of a luck diary tries to do.

It's similar to a gratitude journal in that it focuses your mind on the good things in the world. A luck diary helps you notice events when luck is on your side, and if you can incorporate that into your journaling habit, it helps you notice more lucky opportunities in life.

At the end of each day, write down a sense of gratitude you have for your friends, health, career, or whatever gratitude intervention—all the best things that happened in the last 24 hours or something negative that used to happen that no longer happens.

By doing this, you start to build up a written record (and you do have to write it, just thinking it doesn't work) of how lucky you are, how fortunate you are, how good your life is. This is going to change your self-perception.

write down:

Things you're grateful for (friends, health, career, etc.)
The best things that happened in the last 24 hours
Negative things that used to happen but no longer do

2. Build a Network of Luck

You've probably heard the saying that to be more successful, it's not about what you know, it's about who you know. I've never vibed with this because I always felt networking was a bit weird, but when it comes to luck, there's just so much evidence around how people who actually maximize their network opportunities in a non-weird way tend to be the luckier people.

For example, in my life, so many things have happened through just a random person I met on School or on the street, who recognized me or at a club I went to. All of the good things in my life I can kind of trace back to a completely serendipitous lucky encounter with a random person because I put myself out there and I did a thing and I spoke to someone or whatever that might be.

As I was rereading the book, this was one of the things that most struck me because a lot of lucky people tend to, for example, strike up a conversation with people in coffee shops or in queues or whatever, and I tend not to do that. I kind of had a phase where I used to do that back in the day when I was actively trying to work on becoming more confident and assured, but then I stopped and I'm always on my phone or listening to an audiobook. As I was reading this book, I was thinking, "Damn, I probably let so many interesting opportunities pass me by" by just not striking up a conversation and not just doing my best to maintain my network of friends and teachers. So that's a real practical tip that I'm taking away from the book myself.

In the book, Wiseman talks about two potential exercises that you can do to help increase your lucky network:

"Connect Four": Every week, make it a point to speak to someone that you don't know. It could be an interaction in a shop, in a coffee shop, on the road, or on a bus. Your job is every week to make one of these new connections or at least talk to someone new.
"The Contact Game": Every week, make contact with someone that you haven't been in touch with for a while. This could be sending them a text or a voice note or just a random phone call. The idea is that by doing these exercises, you're building and maintaining your "network of luck" and then at some point down the line, good, serendipitous things will start to happen to you.

3. Become More Approachable

This is again something interesting that Wiseman talks about in the book. When he was doing his studies, he and his research team could kind of tell at first glance who were the people who would consider themselves lucky and who would consider themselves unlucky. The lucky people just tended to have more cheerful and open body language, seemed more optimistic, and just seemed to be happier overall. The unlucky people tended to be more closed off and a little bit more stressed and anxious-looking.

The theory here is that because lucky events happen when we're exposed to serendipitous interactions with different kinds of people, we are far more likely to get lucky events happening to us if we become the sort of more approachable people. If our body language is friendly and open, and we're warm and we smile at people, rather than scowl and frown and just sit on our phones whenever we're out in public, we're more likely to have someone come up and talk to us. That's how lucky events happen to us.

So:

Maintain open body language
Smile and appear warm
Avoid constantly being on your phone in public
Be willing to engage in conversations with strangers

4. Set Lucky Goals

When setting goals—and setting goals is a good thing, all the evidence shows it—you want to try and set goals that are optimistic rather than pessimistic, goals that are kind of assuming that you're going to be luckier than maybe you feel now. The idea here is not that you want to set totally unrealistic goals, but generally, all the evidence shows that when you set an optimistic goal or when you set an ambitious target, you're more likely to work towards hitting that target, and you're more likely to actually achieve that target than if you set a more conservative, pessimistic one.

There is a balance here. My issue with goals has always been that if you set an ambitious goal, it's very easy to tie your own personal self-worth to the accomplishment of that goal, and so if you don't hit the goal, it starts to feel really bad. What I've realized over time is that when it comes to setting goals, it is absolutely fine to set an ambitious, optimistic goal, but at the same time recognize that:

a) The journey is more important than the destination in terms of getting to the goal

b) Enjoying the journey is more important than reaching the destination

c) Try not to be too attached to the outcome

So it's like having a goal but being non-attached to the outcome. I think this is how we get the best of both worlds here.

When setting goals:

Be optimistic rather than pessimistic
Set ambitious targets (within reason)
Focus on enjoying the journey, not just reaching the destination
Avoid tying your self-worth to goal accomplishment
Practice non-attachment to outcomes

5. Look on the Bright Side

If you ever struggle with things in life, then try and look out for the silver lining. Again, there's so much evidence about this, like gratitude journaling and all this kind of stuff. When you focus on the good things that are happening, even if something really bad happens, if you focus on the good that came out of it and reframe failure as learning, for example, that then helps you bounce back from negative events and become more resilient. This is the trait that these lucky people in all these studies seem to have.

Cultivate resilience by finding the silver lining in negative events:

Focus on the good things that happen, even during challenging times
Reframe failures as learning opportunities
Practice gratitude regularly
Use these perspectives to bounce back from setbacks more effectively

Luck isn't just a matter of chance – it's something you can actively cultivate in your life. By applying these principles and techniques from "The Luck Factor," we can open ourselves up to more opportunities, bounce back from setbacks, and create our own luck. Remember, becoming luckier is a process. It's about changing our mindset and habits over time.

Remember, becoming luckier is a skill that can be developed over time. Start small by incorporating one or two of these techniques into your daily routine, and gradually build up your "luck muscles." Who knows what amazing opportunities might come your way? Stay curious, stay lucky, and keep growing!

Hit that follow button by clicking on my profile so you get that notification when I post something amazing instead of working hard to find it between other posts (Just 1 super mind-blowing post per day so no spamming notifications at all!!!)

I really hope you find them helpful and start using the tips I share. I've dedicated my entire freshman year to researching productivity, life improvement, study techniques, note-taking methods, and more. This involved reading tons of books, scouring the web, talking to people, and watching around 3000 hours of YouTube videos on these topics.

If there's a specific book or topic you'd like me to cover in a post, just let me know. I'm happy to do it.

So your comments keep these posts visible. For some reason, the algorithm only shows the post when there's a new comment (we totally need a better system... 🫤).

So to know that you have started using one of the techniques, I want you to comment by answering these questions: