How To Make Your Own Luck

"It's better to be lucky than smart." "You make your own luck in life." "Some folks are just born lucky." In an environment marked by rising tensions and diminished expectations, most of us could use a little luck -- at our companies, in our careers, with our investments. Richard Wiseman thinks that he can help you find some.

Wiseman, 37, is head of a psychology research department at the University of Hertfordshire in England. For the past eight years, he and his colleagues at the university's Perrott-Warrick Research Unit have studied what makes some people lucky and others not. After conducting thousands of interviews and hundreds of experiments, Wiseman now claims that he's cracked the code. Luck isn't due to kismet, karma, or coincidence, he says. Instead, lucky folks -- without even knowing it -- think and behave in ways that create good fortune in their lives. In his new book, The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles (Miramax, 2003), Wiseman reveals four approaches to life that turn certain people into luck magnets. (And, as luck would have it, he tells the rest of us how to improve our own odds.)

Wiseman's four principles turn out to be slightly more polished renditions of some of the self-help canon's greatest hits. One thing Wiseman discovered, for example, was that when things go awry, the lucky "turn bad luck into good" by seeing how they can squeeze some benefit from the misfortune. (Lemonade, anyone?) The lucky also "expect good fortune," which no doubt has Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, grinning in his grave.

But if these insights aren't exactly groundbreaking, neither are they wrongheaded. For instance, Wiseman found that lucky people are particularly open to possibility. Why do some people always seem to find fortune? It's not dumb luck. Unlike everyone else, they see it. "Most people are just not open to what's around them," Wiseman says. "That's the key to it."

Wiseman began his career as a teenage magician who joined London's prestigious Magic Circle society and journeyed to Hollywood to perform for thousands. "Magic is very good training for seeing the world from somebody else's perspective," he says. Wiseman's latest research makes several forays into areas where most scholars rarely tread: He has investigated the psychological underpinnings of magic, the dynamics of deception, and the psychology of the paranormal. In 2001, he achieved international notoriety conducting a yearlong search for the world's funniest joke, testing how some 350,000 participants reacted to 40,000 jokes.

Fast Company was lucky enough to catch up with the hip and affable professor at a café overlooking London's Hyde Park.

How did a serious academic like you become interested in a squishy subject like luck?

Round about 10 years ago, I was talking to people about why they'd ended up where they'd ended up in their lives -- the people they were with, the careers they were in, and so on. And the words that kept coming up were things like "luck" and "chance." People said, "I met my partner by chance." Or "I'm in this particular career because I just happened to go to this party." I knew from the psychology literature that psychologists avoided luck. They said you couldn't do science with it. So I decided to test that. I did some research that asked people, "Do you consider yourself unlucky, or lucky?"

Over time, we built up a database of about 400 people from all over the UK, all walks of life, who considered themselves especially lucky or unlucky. The people in both groups were saying, "I've no idea why this is the case; I'm just lucky" -- or unlucky. But I didn't believe that for a minute. I thought there was something else going on. So in the Luck Project, we've had them take part in experiments, interviewed them, had them keep diaries -- all sorts of things -- trying to piece together why you'd have one group of people for whom everything would work out well and another group for whom things would be completely disastrous.

Isn't there a distinction between chance and luck?

There's a big distinction. Chance events are like winning the lottery. They're events over which we have no control, other than buying a ticket. They don't consistently happen to the same person. They may be formative events in people's lives, but they're not frequent. When people say that they consistently experience good fortune, I think that, by definition, it has to be because of something they are doing.

In other words, they make their own luck.

That's right. What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.