Can You Make Yourself Luckier? The Psychology Behind Creating More Good Fortune
Can You Make Yourself Luckier? The Psychology Behind Creating More Good Fortune
- Luck is not completely under your control, but your habits can affect how often you notice and act on opportunities.
- Richard Wiseman's research linked self-described lucky people with openness to chance, intuition, positive expectations, and resilience.
- Changing routines and expanding your social network can expose you to information and opportunities outside your usual circle.
- Reframing setbacks does not erase bad events, but it can reduce their power to shut down future action.
Some people seem to keep landing in the right place at the right time. They meet the right person, hear about an opportunity before everyone else, recover quickly from setbacks, and somehow end up describing the whole thing as “good luck.”
Random chance obviously exists. You cannot mindset your way into controlling a lottery drawing, the weather, or every event around you. But psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years studying people who described themselves as unusually lucky or unlucky and argued that behavior and thinking patterns can influence how much useful chance people encounter and capitalize on.
That makes luck less like a magical force and more like a probability problem. You cannot control the dice, but you can change how often you roll them, what you notice after they land, and what you do next.
1. Lucky People Notice Opportunities Other People Miss
The first advantage is not supernatural timing. It is attention. Being too narrowly focused can make an opportunity effectively invisible even when it is sitting directly in front of you.
One of Wiseman's best-known demonstrations involved asking people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky to count photographs in a newspaper. The paper also contained large messages that effectively gave participants an easier way to complete the task, along with another unexpected opportunity. The self-described unlucky participants were more likely to remain focused on counting and miss what had been placed in plain sight.
The practical lesson is broader than a newspaper experiment. When you become obsessed with one narrowly defined outcome, you may overlook alternatives. Someone searching only for one exact job title may ignore a different role that fits better. Someone attending an event solely to meet a potential client may miss a useful friendship, introduction, or new idea.
Wiseman described lucky participants as generally more relaxed and open to what was happening around them. The goal is not to abandon focus. It is to leave enough mental bandwidth to notice something you were not expecting.
2. Intuition Can Be Useful Without Treating It Like Magic
Wiseman identified listening to intuition as one of the recurring principles among people who described themselves as lucky. That does not mean every gut feeling is correct.
There is an important difference between intuition and superstition. Wiseman's work did not support the idea that lucky charms or rituals somehow alter external events. His framework instead focused on differences in how people think, decide, notice opportunities, and respond to uncertainty.
A gut reaction can sometimes reflect information you have absorbed without deliberately listing every clue. Maybe a business deal technically checks every box but something about the interaction feels inconsistent. Maybe one option immediately seems more natural because it resembles situations you have handled before.
That still does not make intuition infallible. Bias, fear, wishful thinking, and incomplete information can all produce strong feelings. A useful approach is to treat intuition as a signal worth examining, not as unquestionable evidence. The point is to avoid getting trapped in endless analysis when a reasonable decision can already be made.
3. Positive Expectations Change What You Do Next
Optimism cannot guarantee a good outcome. Its advantage is that people who expect future opportunities are more likely to keep looking, trying, and responding when those opportunities appear.
Wiseman described positive expectations as another major feature of the lucky mindset. In his framework, expectations can become self-reinforcing. Someone who assumes that a conversation might lead somewhere useful is more likely to start it. Someone who believes another opportunity will appear is more likely to keep searching after a rejection.
This is where optimism has a practical effect. It influences behavior. Consider two people who receive the same rejection email. One interprets it as proof that nothing ever works out. The other treats it as one failed attempt and submits another application. Neither interpretation changes the rejection that already happened, but it can change the number of future opportunities each person encounters.
The useful version of optimism is not pretending every plan will succeed. It is maintaining the assumption that one disappointing outcome does not tell you what every future outcome will be.
4. A Wider Network Creates More Paths for Luck to Travel
Repeatedly interacting with the same people and places limits the number of new inputs in your life. Variety creates more chances for unexpected information and introductions.
Wiseman observed that many lucky participants deliberately introduced variety into their routines. They changed routes, interacted with different people, or put themselves in situations that created new combinations of experiences. His point was simple: repeating the same routine exposes you to many of the same opportunities, while variation creates new ones.
This idea fits with sociologist Mark Granovetter's influential work on the “strength of weak ties.” Casual acquaintances can connect you with information outside your close social circle because they often participate in different networks. That matters for opportunities such as jobs, introductions, ideas, and information that your closest friends may simply never encounter.
You do not need to become the person aggressively networking with everyone within a 20-foot radius. Humanity has suffered enough business cards. The useful principle is smaller: occasionally expand beyond your usual circle. A short conversation with a neighbor, coworker from another department, conference attendee, or familiar face at a local coffee shop creates one more connection through which information can travel.
5. Reframing Bad Luck Can Keep One Setback From Becoming Five
Lucky people still experience bad events. The difference Wiseman emphasized was how they interpreted those events afterward and whether the setback changed their expectations about the future.
Wiseman examined how lucky and unlucky participants responded to hypothetical misfortune. The lucky participants were more likely to imagine ways the situation could have been worse. Psychologists call this type of comparison counterfactual thinking. In this context, it helped participants interpret a negative event without allowing it to define everything that followed.
Reframing does not mean pretending something painful, expensive, embarrassing, or unfair was secretly wonderful. A bad event can remain bad. The useful question is whether your interpretation makes the next decision better or worse.
“I always have terrible luck” turns one event into a permanent identity. “That failed, and now I know something I didn't know before” leaves room for another attempt. Resilience protects your future opportunities from being cancelled by your past disappointments.
Key Takeaways at a Glance
Extreme tunnel vision can make useful opportunities harder to notice.
A gut feeling can deserve attention without being treated as a magical or infallible signal.
Optimism matters most when it keeps you acting after an outcome fails to go your way.
New people and new routines expose you to information your normal circle may never provide.
A setback becomes more damaging when it convinces you to stop creating future opportunities.
| Habit | What It Changes | Everyday Example |
|---|---|---|
| Open awareness | What you notice | Considering an unexpected opportunity |
| Intuition | How you evaluate decisions | Investigating a persistent gut reaction |
| Positive expectations | Whether you keep trying | Applying again after rejection |
| Network variety | Who and what you encounter | Talking with someone outside your usual circle |
| Reframing setbacks | How failure affects future action | Turning a failed attempt into useful feedback |
What Actually Matters If You Want to Become Luckier
You cannot eliminate randomness. Terrible things sometimes happen to careful people, and extraordinary opportunities sometimes arrive without warning or merit. Any theory claiming complete control over luck would merely be superstition wearing business-casual clothes.
What you can influence is your exposure to opportunities, awareness of them, willingness to act, and response when an attempt fails. Change one routine. Pay attention to an option you normally would have dismissed. Maintain a few connections outside your closest circle. When something fails, separate the event from the story you tell yourself about what it means.
That will not guarantee good fortune. It simply creates more chances for useful things to happen and makes you less likely to waste them when they do. In practical terms, that may be the closest thing psychology has to practicing luck.
Sources
University of Hertfordshire • Richard Wiseman, “The Luck Factor”
University of Hertfordshire Research Profiles • The Luck Factor
University of Hertfordshire • Professor Richard Wiseman Research Profile
Stanford University Department of Sociology • Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties”
