Luck can seem synonymous with randomness. To call
someone lucky is usually to deny the relevance of their hard work or
talent. As Richard Wiseman, the Professor of Public Understanding of
Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, puts it,
lucky people “appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right
place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky
breaks.”
What do these people have that the rest of us don’t? It turns out
“ability” is the key word here. Beyond their level of privilege or the
circumstances they were born into, the luckiest people may have a
specific set of skills that bring chance opportunities their way.
Somehow, they’ve learned ways to turn life’s odds in their favor.
Demystifying this luck skillset has been a personal project of Christine Carter, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center,
at the University of California, Berkeley. A few years ago, she was
putting together an online course for families on raising happier kids.
She translates research findings on qualities such as gratitude,
mindfulness, and happiness into quantifiable, teachable skills. Amidst
her work, she stumbled upon a funny little concept that seemed to be
entangled with all these things—luck. “On the academic side of things,
I’ve always been sort of skeptical of any concept related to luck,” says
Carter. “Because as a sociologist, it’s like, Oh, so all those children
in Darfur are just not lucky? We know that there are other things
there.”
“His research is hilarious.”
Then Carter stumbled on Wiseman’s luck research (one of his books is
The Luck Factor,
published in 2004). Wiseman started out as a magician and made his
career researching the more unusual niches of psychology (a 2002 study, published in
The Journal of Parapsychology,
is titled, “An Investigation into the Alleged Haunting of Hampton Court
Palace: Psychological Variables and Magnetic Fields”). By the 1990s, he
had taken on an unconventional project—running experiments on
self-proclaimed lucky and unlucky people and attempting to quantify
their differences. “His research is hilarious,” says Carter. “He takes
people who self-define as lucky and people who don’t say they’re lucky,
and then he puts a $20 bill in the street and the lucky people notice
them and pick them up. And unlucky people don’t.”
The experimental design may seem a little silly, a superficial way to
distinguish the fortunate from the unfortunate. Yet this was the kind
of result that Wiseman found in several related experiments over the course of about 10 years, from about 1993 to 2003. In one such study,
Wiseman provided a group of volunteers with a newspaper and instructed
them to count the photographs inside. Written in large font on half of
the second page was this message: “Stop counting—there are 43
photographs in this newspaper.” A similar insert placed halfway through
the paper read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this
and win $250.” Overall, the self-identified unlucky participants were
left counting. It suggested that luck could have something to do with
spotting opportunities, even when they were unexpected.
Wiseman didn’t stop there. He turned these findings into a “luck
school” where people could learn luck-inducing techniques based on four
main principles of luck: maximizing chance opportunities, listening to
your intuition, expecting good fortune, and turning bad luck to good.
The strategies included using meditation to enhance intuition,
relaxation, visualizing good fortune, and talking to at least one new
person every week. A month later, he followed up with participants. Eighty percent said they were happier, luckier people.
“I thought if Wiseman can train people to be lucky, you can certainly
teach those skills to our kids, and they have other really good side
effects too,” says Carter, like better social skills and a stronger
sense of gratitude. She came up with a few basic strategies
for parents to teach their kids, including being open to new
experiences, learning to relax, maintaining social connections, and
(yes) talking to strangers. All of these techniques had one theme in
common—being more open to your environment both physically and
emotionally.
“If you’re anxious that you won’t find a parking place, then literally your vision narrows. You lose your peripheral vision.”
It makes sense. The more observant you are of your surroundings, the
more likely you are to capture a valuable resource or avoid tragedy.
Lucky people don’t magically attract new opportunities and good fortune.
They stroll along with their eyes wide open, fully present in the
moment (a problem for people glued to phone screens). This also means
that anything that affects our physical or emotional ability to take in
our environment also affects our so-called “luckiness”—anxiety, for one.
Anxiety physically and emotionally closes us off to chance
opportunities.
“If you’re anxious that you won’t find a parking place, then literally your vision narrows,” says Carter. “You lose your peripheral vision the more anxious you are because your flight-or-fight mechanism creates binocular vision.” Anxious people bias their attention
to potential threats, and are predictably less likely to converse with
strangers. “We teach our kids not to talk to strangers and we teach them
to fear other people, and that shuts them down to the opportunities
that people might bring, but also creates anxiety,” says Carter.
Proponents of “stranger danger”
might balk, but the idea is relatively straightforward: reduce kids’
fear and anxiety toward meeting new people, and consequently open them
up to the advantageous connections that people can bring.
Carter discovered that simply opening up parents’ minds this way to
the idea that luck could be learned made a big difference. Carter
herself admits she comes from a long line of anxious women, and learning
these luck skills wasn’t easy. But once you do, she says, you can begin
to see the good in unlucky situations, which can improve your response
to misfortune.
In the
Huffington Post, Carter wrote, “My kids and I love to read Jon Muth’s book
Zen Shorts,
which includes an ancient parable about a farmer’s son who breaks his
leg. When his neighbors say, ‘What bad luck!’ the farmer says only
‘Maybe.’ Turns out the broken leg sav
es his son from going to war….”
Teresa Iafolla