How to Create Luck

Yes - you actually can increase your luck by conceiving of yourself as lucky, exposing yourself to many new experiences, taking chances and increasing your 'luck surface area' by doing more things and telling more people about it.

Is luck just chance? Is luck outside of personal control? Social scientists don't think so. They see luck as the result of personal actions, an alchemy of openness to new experiences and a penchant for chance-taking.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.“ – Tennessee Williams

In fact, researchers have found that people who think of themselves as lucky behave in ways that appear to multiply the potential for good outcomes by investing themselves in a multitude of endeavours. The more varied your routine, the more chance encounters you will have. The more you mix up your routine and shake things up, the more new experiences you have and with that comes the enthusiasm to take advantage of them. This sounds a lot like resilience. And thats because it is.

Be resilient

Resilient and lucky people have this in common - they both accept adversity. When confronting a crisis or disappointment, they learn from the experience. They recalibrate their thinking. They choose a new hopeful path. They benefit from their misfortune.

This positive and constructive attitude means it can be possible to negate bad luck in life by flipping the script and meeting challenges with what would conventionally be called a 'growth mindset' of turning setbacks into opportunities for forward movement. Everything is an opportunity for something - choose what it is!

Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck. - Dalai Lama XIV

A study conducted with 400 people over the course of 10 years showed that 'lucky people' have a powerful hand in outcomes and their own good fortune. Several habits of lucky people were defined:

• They are awake to possibility and are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.
• They listen to their gut, trust their intuition and act on it.
• They map out their desires and manifest a positive future by creating self-fulfilling prophecies and actively embracing positive expectations.
• They make lemonade out of lemons, adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Be active:

• Embrace failure as a life lesson.

• Employ counterfactual thinking to soften bad experiences (A.K.A. 'it could be worse').
• Reach out to people you don't know and broaden your social circle.
• Introduce newness into your life on the regular, exposing yourself to alternative experiences and points of view.
• Break out of monotony. Don't get stuck in a microcosm or echo-chamber.
• Say yes more often, accept invitations, try new things, be a beginner, go somewhere new.
• Smile.

[ Update with more information gleaned from this article - below ]

swyx wrote an excellent article that I found on Hackernews all about 'increasing your luck surface area'. He starts off by reminding us of the four different 'ways to get lucky';

1. Hope luck finds you.
2. Hustle until you stumble into it.
3. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
4. Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.

Some quotes:

Whether you think the world conspires with you or against you, you’re right. - A riff on Henry Ford

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. - Seneca

If you view all the things that happen to you, both good and bad, as opportunities, then you operate out of a higher level of consciousness. - Les Brown