Some people seem to have a crazy amount of luck. They get the promotion they probably weren’t qualified for, or meet someone at a bar who ends up offering them their dream job. And you’re over here getting a parking ticket because you were 2 minutes late to the meter. What the heck are these people doing differently?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years trying to answer that question. In one experiment, he gave people newspapers and asked them to count the photographs. The participants had already described themselves as either lucky or unlucky, and Wiseman wanted to see how they approached the task.
The Secret to Being Lucky Might Have Nothing to Do With Chance
On page two, he’d actually planted a message in enormous letters saying there were 43 photographs and they could stop counting. The lucky people almost immediately spotted the clue. The unlucky ones spent about two minutes counting pictures, missing the giant answer sitting in front of them.
Wiseman also hid another message farther into the newspaper, offering $250 to anyone who noticed it. The unlucky participants missed that one, too.
“Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else,” Wiseman explained.
His research suggested that people who considered themselves unlucky were generally more anxious, making it harder to notice opportunities they weren’t already looking for. Those who felt lucky were more relaxed about how things might turn out.
Of course, some people are born with advantages that make good fortune much easier to come by. Psychology Today executive editor Lybi Ma discussed the Matthew Effect, the idea that having resources and opportunities early in life can lead to even greater advantages later. Having wealthy parents, for example, certainly doesn’t hurt.
Ma also shared an extraordinary story about her father, a government translator in China during the Communist Revolution. When he couldn’t escape the country, Flying Tigers founder Claire Chennault arranged for him to hide in a pile of lamb’s wool. He stayed there for three days before a pilot rescued him.
“I think Dad was lucky because he believed he was,” Ma wrote.
NYU researcher Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset, calls opportunities people help create “smart luck.” As he explained in an interview, it’s something “we have to work for in some ways.”
That could mean talking to somebody you wouldn’t normally approach or accepting an invitation you’d usually turn down. Most of the time, nothing extraordinary will happen. But every once in a while, you might meet someone who changes your life trajectory.
Maybe some people really are luckier than others. But it’s also possible they’re noticing opportunities the rest of us are too distracted to see.
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