Are you choosing to be lucky, punk?
Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Copyright Warner Bros. Inc. and the Malpaso Company.
I’m on a journey to a happier life at the moment. Over the last few years I’ve read and thought a lot about what this means and how to achieve it, and tried lots of things - some worked, some didn’t. I’m sure I’ll share some of them with you in later posts.
The key insight, though, is simple:
Happiness can be learned.
Happiness is not something which ‘just happens to you’. Happiness is brought about by a certain worldview and behaviour set - and if your worldview and behaviours aren’t optimised for happiness, it is possible to change them for ones which are.
Some people don’t need to, thought, right? Some people are just lucky - they are born beautiful, or smart, or rich, or they buy the right lottery ticket or meet the right stranger at an airport. You can’t learn that, right?
Wrong.
Luck is analogous to happiness - it is a worldview and behaviour set which can be learned.
My dad has always loved this quote:
It’s a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get.
This quote has been attributed to various golfers, most commonly Gary Player or Arnold Palmer, though evidence suggests it predates them, possibly as far back as Confucius.
Regardless of who said it, the quote resonates because it makes a profound point - luck isn’t something magical which ‘just happens’ - it’s the result of behaviours which can be learned.
I was reminded of this recently when watching Bill Burnett’s excellent TEDx talk ‘Designing your Life’. In it, Burnett mentions a study in which participants were asked to rate how lucky they were on 0-10 scale (0 being unluckiest and 10 being luckiest). Then, the participants were asked to read a 30 page newspaper extract and count the number of pictures in it (Burnett quips, ‘Of course, you all know that when a graduate tells you what the experiment is, that’s not the experiment.’). The extract contained, in large letters, a message saying that if you read this, the experiment is over, and you get a bonus $150.
Who noticed the hidden message? That’s right - the ones who rated themselves as ‘lucky’.
Why is this? Why did the lucky ones notice the message, and the unlucky ones miss it?
Well, either:
They noticed because they are lucky
They are lucky because they noticed
I think it’s 2 - people who are ‘lucky’ are people who tend to spot chance opportunities and take them.
There’s a great story about a guy called Barnett Helzberg Jr. (excellent name). He had a successful jewellery business which he was looking to sell so he could retire. He was sitting outside the Plaza Hotel in New York when he overheard a waitress addressing the man next to him as ‘Mr. Buffett’. Helzberg wondered if this 'Mr. Buffett’ was the Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, and struck up a conversation. It was indeed Warren Buffett and around a year later, after many more meetings, Buffett bought Helzberg’s business.
All from a chance encounter! What luck!
Yes - what luck indeed. Helzberg had to:
BE THERE. This required Helzberg to go out into the world.
NOTICE the name Buffett. This required awareness, keeping his peripheral vision switched on.
CONNECT it with Warren Buffett. This required knowledge - i.e. that there is a billionaire investor called Buffett who lives in New York. Interestingly, the Confucian version of the quote above is, ‘The more you know, the luckier you become’.
TRUST his intuition and ACT on it. This requires confidence.
It turns out that the newspaper study reference by Burnett was done by a group led by Richard Wiseman - a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire who’s written a book on luck: The Luck Factor. Wiseman is a strong proponent of the idea that luck can be taught - he has even created a ‘Luck School’ which taught people how to be luckier, apparently with great success.
Wiseman also talks about the other side of the ‘luckiness coin’ - luck is not just about noticing and taking ‘lucky breaks’ - it’s also about how you interpret events. He gives the example of a bystander who is shot in the arm during a bank robbery. They can interpret this as either:
‘Oh my God, how unlucky, I went to the bank and ended up getting shot.’ or,
‘Wow - that was lucky! That could have been so much worse, that bullet could’ve killed me!’
Same event, but person 1 leaves a victim, and person 2 is a lucky survivor.
How about another example: two athletes at the Olympic games, one wins a bronze medal, the other a silver. Who is happier?
Wiseman’s work suggests that it is the bronze medallists, on average, who are happier. They’re delighted to have placed in the medals, whereas the silver medalists are focused on how if they had just run a little faster, jumped a little higher, or thrown a little farther, they could have won gold.
The common principle at work here is that people who consider themselves fortunate are looking down, not up - i.e. they are thinking of how things could have been worse (‘I could have been killed’, ‘I might not have won a medal at all’). Wiseman argues that this worldview, too, can be practised.
So try it. Put yourself in new situations - a new class, a conversation with a new person, a new route to work - to increase your exposure to new opportunities. Practise presence - turn off your tech and notice the world around you. Listen to your gut - those physical sensations are information from deep regions of the brain which are not directly linked to conscious thought. Trust yourself. Finally, whenever something happens which upsets you, turn the focus onto how it could have been worse.
I’m going to give it a go. You never know, I might get lucky…
Wiseman summarises his work on luck in an excellent article, here. Most of the ideas in this post are his.