How to Be Lucky

What’s the formula for success? Hard work? Talent? Grit? That’s what we’re often told. But what if there’s another important ingredient that we rarely acknowledge?

The truth is that luck plays a much greater role in success than we like to admit. Whether we’re talking pop megastars, entrepreneurs or world leaders, random chance can be the difference that helps some people make it to the top.

So why do we overlook the role of luck? And, if we’re all at the mercy of random chance, can we make our own luck?

Take a look at my short explainer video:

What is luck?

Many of us underestimate the role of random chance in our lives because we find it uncomfortable. 

That big promotion? We earned it through our hard work, preparation and intelligence. Scoring a goal in a five-a-side game? Obviously the result of our skill and footballing brilliance. But factors beyond our control, like being in the right place at the right time? Well, these feel a lot less satisfying. Some find them borderline offensive.

Luck is “the chance occurrence of situations or events” – in other words, randomness. And randomness is everywhere. From subatomic particles and genetic mutations to lottery draws and everyday coincidences – the world is full of chance events that defy neat and predictable patterns like cause and effect.

That’s the problem with success = talent + effort. It’s reassuring and puts us in the driving seat. But it ignores the inherently random nature of the universe.

Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman put forward an alternative formula: success = talent + luck; great success = a little more talent and a lot of luck.

Need convincing? Let’s look at luck’s role in a few notable success stories.

Lucky breaks

Taylor Swift is the most successful pop star of the 21st century. She has won 12 Grammy Awards, had 14 no. 1 albums and recently became the first artist to pass 100 billion streams on Spotify. It’s almost inconceivable that you haven’t heard at least something about her Eras tour – a global cultural phenomenon that became the first ever to rack up more than $1 billion in ticket sales. By the tour’s end, that record had doubled to over $2 billion.

Swift’s talent marked her out for success from an early age. At 14, she became the youngest person to sign a music publishing deal with Sony/ATV – testament to her precocious songwriting ability. There’s also no doubt that she’s incredibly hardworking. The record-breaking Eras tour saw her perform 149 three-and-a-half-hour shows spanning 51 cities in five continents. As a songwriter she’s famously prolific – writing, or at least co-writing, every song she has ever released, as well as finding time to pen hits for other artists like Miley Cyrus, Ed Sheeran and Calvin Harris.

So, is Taylor Swift more talented and hard-working than every other pop star of her generation? Maybe. There’s no shortage of diehard Swifties and cultural commentators who can make a persuasive case that her abilities as a writer, performer – and businesswoman – are unparalleled.

But what about the Kahneman formula? Might chance have helped her on her path to global superstardom? 

It doesn’t diminish Swift’s incredible achievements to acknowledge she had a lucky break very early on. She was born to wealthy parents who eagerly supported her musical aspirations. And I mean, really supported. When she was 13, they sold their farm in Pennsylvania and relocated to Nashville to give her a better chance of breaking into the country music scene. A couple of years later, when she signed her first recording contract, her dad – a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch – invested thousands of dollars in the record company.

Would she still have made it without these lucky breaks? We’ll never know. But circumstances beyond her control – perhaps even including the fact that her grandmother was an opera singer – certainly helped.

It’s not just today’s pop megastars. The Beatles famously honed their craft playing eight-hour sets in the dingy and seedy nightclubs of Hamburg. But this key chapter in the Fab Four’s origin story came about through pure chance –  a German promoter bumped into someone from Liverpool while scouting for bands in London.

They got lucky again when a 27-year-old Brian Epstein took a lunchtime detour to a matinee show at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. He saw a band with a reputation for being “unreliable, unpunctual and arrogant”. They’d almost broken up earlier that year. But Epstein decided he wanted to champion them, and in the process, moulded them into the suit-wearing moptops who took the world by storm and redefined popular music. Cass Sunstein — the behavioural psychologist who developed Nudge theory — argues that however huge their talent, there would have been no Beatlemania without a little help from Lady Luck.

In Outliers (a book I explored in a recent iluli blog), Malcolm Gladwell says that almost all successful people are “invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities.”

A young Bill Gates was sent to one of the few schools in the world with its own computer terminal. Steve Jobs grew up in Silicon Valley, and had Hewlett Packard and Fairchild Semiconductors on the doorstep. Both were raised by supportive families (Jobs by his adoptive parents) and born within a few months of each other in 1955. The cards fell neatly so they could make their mark just as the biggest technological revolution of the century was starting.

Like Taylor Swift and The Beatles, they had the good fortune to find themselves in the right place at the right time.

Are you lucky?

On 6th August 1945, 29-year-old marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was getting ready to journey home after a long business trip. Making his way to the train station, he realised he’d forgotten his ID. He left behind the two colleagues he was travelling with and returned to his workplace to collect it. As he was walking back along the Hiroshima docks, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city centre.

Yamaguchi was injured, but he was able to take the train home the following day and return to work. At 11am on 9th August, at the Mitsubishi offices on the outskirts of Nagasaki, he was telling his supervisor what had happened. That was when the second atomic bomb dropped. 

Yamaguchi is the only person known to have survived both nuclear attacks. Was he incredibly lucky or catastrophically unlucky?

It’s an impossible question to answer. But it highlights a fundamental flaw in trying to organise the universe’s infinite number of possible random events into examples of “good” or “bad” luck. 

Chance occurrences aren’t inherently lucky or unlucky. We just tend to use these labels retrospectively once we’ve seen how things turned out. And even this is often a matter of perspective.

In the film Charlie Wilson’s War, the CIA agent played by Philip Seymour Hoffman tells Tom Hanks’ titular character the story of the Zen master and the little boy: 

There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, ‘how wonderful. The boy got a horse.’ And the Zen master says, ‘we'll see.’ “Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, ‘how terrible.’ And the Zen master says, ‘we'll see.’ “Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't, ’cause his leg is all messed up. And everybody in the village says, ‘how wonderful’.

You can guess what the Zen master said next.

We can acknowledge the importance of luck without dismissing achievement (“they got lucky”) or denying our ability to make a difference (“I’m just unlucky”).

So, are you lucky? We’ll see…

How to be lucky

If being lucky is the key to success, then can we do anything to influence our luck?

According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, yes we can. The secret is… to believe that you are lucky.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This sounds dangerously like the sort of dubious pseudoscience you’d expect to hear peddled by life coaches and mildly annoying social media influencers using hashtags like #LuckyGirlSyndrome. No one can manifest a million pounds, and positive affirmations definitely can’t cure illness.

But what Wiseman’s research shows is that people who believe themselves lucky tend to notice more opportunities, take more risks and bounce back from failures more quickly.

If we follow the logic of the old saying, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” then it’s not too hard to believe that people who feel positively about their luck might be better prepared to maximise their opportunities. 

Drawing on Wiseman’s findings, leading statistician David Spiegelhalter set out a list of traits that lead to good luck: the ability to capitalise on opportunities; the intuition to know how to act when opportunities present themselves; positive expectations, which in turn boost confidence; and the resilience to turn setbacks into opportunities.

Dr Christian Busch, a lecturer at LSE and New York University, believes that this last trait is key to how we improve our luck:

Developing this ‘serendipity mindset’, as I call it, is both a philosophy of life and a capability that you can shape and nurture in yourself. You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots. It is about seeing bridges where others see gaps, and then taking initiative and action(s) to create smart luck.

Helpfully, he offers up some tips to get us started:

1. Reframe how you think about luck – it’s not about events happening out of the blue, but a process of spotting and connecting the dots.

2. Challenge your biases – habits of thought like functional fixedness (where we struggle to see past established ways of doing things) can be an obstacle to recognising and embracing chance opportunities.

3. Cultivate a serendipity mindset – practical steps like journalling, carving out time to think and asking open questions in conversations with others can help “strengthen your serendipity muscle”.

4. Recognise that serendipity is a numbers game – and there are few better ways to maximise your chances for serendipity than talking to strangers. As Busch writes: “If you’re in touch with 100 people, and they each are in touch with 100 other unique connections, you’re essentially in second-degree contact with 10,000 people.”

Ultimately, we can’t control the random nature of the universe. But by acknowledging the role of luck and maintaining a healthy perspective on our own fortune, we can help stack the odds in our favour.

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Recommended links and further reading

• Uncertainty is part of being human, so how can we learn to live with it? (David Spiegelhalter in The Guardian)

• How to be lucky (Psyche Guides)

• What we gain by recognising the role of chance in life (Psyche Ideas)

• How come the improbable is so commonplace (Aeon) 

• Lucky girl syndrome: the potential dark side of TikTok’s extreme positive thinking trend (The Conversation)

• Outliers: Success and the luck factor (iluli blog)