Why Is She So Lucky?
Learning the difference between luck and chance.
A number of years ago I worked as a relocation career consultant. My clients were people who had moved from one geographic location to another. Many of them moved within the US, while others relocated internationally.
As I helped people figure out their vocational future and coached them in their job search, I noticed that some of them got going soon after they arrived in their new homes while others were mired in lethargy for months on end.
While talking with a man in this second group, the client mentioned that he never seemed to have much “luck” finding work quickly. I wondered why not. After all, isn’t luck by its very nature random?
I decided to learn more about luck and was quickly disabused of this naïve notion by the work of Richard Wiseman. Wiseman is a British professor of psychology who has given much of his career to researching the nature of luck.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Wiseman gathered together more than 400 test subjects who considered themselves either especially lucky or particularly unlucky. They came from all walks of life. The youngest was 18 and the oldest was 84.
The project tested and interviewed the participants and monitored their lives over several years. Its purpose was to identify what makes some people lucky and others not. His conclusion, in what seems like an oxymoron, is that we make our own luck.
As he put it in his book, The Luck Factor: “My work revealed that seemingly chance opportunities are the result of lucky people’s psychological make-up. The way they think and behave makes them far more likely than others to create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities in their lives.”
Wiseman differentiates between pure chance and luck. Chance is truly random, like when a $100 bill flutters down from a 30-story window and lands at your feet while you await the next bus. But luck, Wiseman argued, is something else entirely.
After studying both the lucky and the unlucky Wiseman concluded that lucky people exhibit four common personality traits: openness, good intuition, positive expectations, and a capacity to keep moving in the face of adversity.
The first of these is probably the most important. Open people seek out new experiences, new people, new ideas, new self-understandings, and even fresh constructs of reality. They are naturally curious about everything and are willing to change their mind and even their life. They start new ventures and take risks, confident they can learn even from “negative” experiences.
Since these lucky people have an unusually open posture to life it makes sense that they have an intuitive sense of the evolving situations that will prove fruitful for them and that they bring to them a positive expectation. This is one of the reasons why lucky people are interested in engaging with people different from themselves and initiating conversations with people they don’t know.
What all this comes down to is that lucky people are exposed to a wide range of people and situations that can benefit them. They rejoice in unexpected ventures, seeing them full of possibilities.
Lastly, and this is the fourth characteristic that Wiseman cites, lucky people are good at handling adversity. It’s not that lucky people escape suffering or are immune to it. But they react to problems constructively without getting mired down in the poor me’s or becoming disillusioned with life.
Because lucky people have an unusually open attitude toward the world and are disinclined to prejudge the people and events they encounter, they are more likely than others to find learnings and opportunities even in the hard stuff.
Wiseman’s analysis of luck gave me new insight into my career clients, particularly those who felt overwhelmed and immobilized. I wondered what I could do to help them. Telling them to “get out there” or to “move your butt” seemed like inadequate encouragement from a professional career consultant.
But as I continued to read Wiseman I was happy to see that he, also, was concerned about how to help people mobilize themselves. Particularly since his ongoing research showed him that luckless people could be taught luckiness.
So Wiseman took his most unlucky clients and tried to teach them how to be lucky. This second part of Wiseman’s Luck Project was a dramatic success. After being instructed in the principles and practices of luckiness and implementing them in their daily lives, 80 percent of the project’s unlucky participants reported being happier and more satisfied with their lives and, yes, enjoying more luck than they ever had before.
Unlucky people became lucky and lucky people got even luckier. Wiseman concluded that four out of five people can learn, develop, and put into play luck-developing behaviors that can have a significant positive effect on their lives.
Wiseman’s findings about luck turned out to be easily applicable to getting a job because it translates into the practices of effective networking, which is the most common way of finding work. Clients who were shy about networking needed both encouragement and concrete suggestions about how to behave luckily, so to speak. When presented with the evidence from Wiseman’s work they sometimes behaved in unaccustomed ways, such as telling acquaintances the kind of job they were looking for.
It is a truism that change is difficult. This is why every year our bookstores and libraries are flooded with books telling us how to do it. Many of them claim to possess the secret to make life-altering changes in seven or 14 days with no discomfort. Some sell in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The curious thing is that the following year witnesses a similar run on books, as does the year after that, and the year following, and so forth and so on. Most of these books say the same thing. But with different terms and verbiage.
So, either the methods extolled by these books do not work, or people buy them to decorate their living rooms — or both. Many of us consume a steady diet of such books, thereby postponing indefinitely making actual changes. This avalanche of self-help literature obscures the fact that making personal changes rarely is complicated — just difficult.
As Nike has said for decades, just do it. But this is for another article.
