A Luck Experiment

“If You’re So Rich, Why Aren’t You So Smart?” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I got interested in luck recently. Not the superstitious kind of luck, where you avoid opening an umbrella indoors over a black cat while throwing a pinch of salt under a ladder, but whether it is possible to change your experience of luck.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in “Fooled by Randomness” and as Robert H. Frank says in “Success And Luck”, most of what separates billionaires from the rest of us is luck. There are millions of other people who are just as smart, just as hard working, and just as talented, but they’re not billionaires.

A billionaire isn’t a thousand times smarter or a thousand times harder working than a millionaire. A billionaire is a thousand times luckier.

So is there anything you or I can do to influence our experience of luck? Can we learn to be better at noticing and taking advantage of the good things that happen to us and the opportunities that come up?

You might be surprised! I was. That’s what this post is about.

And if you feel like playing along, you can do an experiment to see for yourself.

The Backwards Law

“The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become.” This bit of wisdom from Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” introduces us to the backwards law—a concept first described by philosopher Alan Watts. The backwards law says that the harder we chase something, the more it eludes us.

This applies to self-help in particular. People are drawn to self-help because they’re unhappy with some aspect of their lives, so they find people who claim they have the answer to their problem. But what happens is that by focusing so much on the problem – whether it’s losing weight, being more successful, getting more done or whatever, they’re just setting themselves up for diminishing returns for a goal that’s always just out of reach.

Gratitude practices such as journaling are a great way to escape the hamster wheel of doom inherent in self-help, but there’s something we can do in addition. Gratitude makes us feel better about the present. Feeling lucky makes us feel better about the future, but it also helps us notice our lucky breaks when they occur and lets us do something about them.

How do we get ourselves to feel lucky?

Luckily for us, there’s someone who’s studied that very thing.

Beyond Gratitude: The Power of Feeling Lucky

Dr. Richard Wiseman, who spent a decade studying luck in his research documented in The Luck Factor, found that lucky people create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities. They expect good fortune, and this expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wiseman is a psychologist who started off as a magician. When you think about it, those two careers go brilliantly together, since psychology experiments and magic both often involve misdirection.

“The Luck Factor” is full of funny stories about experiments to measure the difference in behavior between people who feel lucky and people who feel unlucky. Here’s one of them, where the “lucky” and “unlucky” people are self-identified:

The Newspaper Experiment

Wiseman gave both lucky and unlucky participants a newspaper and asked them to count the number of photographs inside. The results were striking:

• Unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs
• Lucky people completed the task in just seconds

The Hidden Message

The key to this difference was a large message Wiseman had placed on the second page of the newspaper, which read: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message:

• Took up half the page
• Was written in type more than 2 inches high
• Was clearly visible to anyone looking at the page

Results and Interpretation

• Lucky people tended to notice the message quickly
• Unlucky people often missed it entirely, focused on counting each photograph

Wiseman concluded that lucky people were more relaxed and open to unexpected information, allowing them to spot opportunities that unlucky people missed.

The Experiment To Try: Keep A Luck Journal

If you don’t want to read a whole book (although I’m sure you’ll feel lucky if you do), here’s a super interesting YouTube video of Ali Abdaal interviewing Richard Wiseman about luck:

• The Sure-Fire Way To Be Luckier In Life - Advice From Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman.

In the video, Richard Wiseman says that keeping a Luck Journal is a great way to increase how lucky you feel, which (as his research shows) will change your luck - and your life. One thing he says is that you can’t just “think” about this - you have to actually write it down.

I’ve put some details on running your own self-experiment below, if you’re feeling lucky (or want to).

First though, here’s a bit of explanation.

The Luck Journal

• Write down all the things that happened today that were lucky.
• Write down the unlucky things that didn’t happen today that often do happen.

Another factor that helps a lot is to use what are called “downward counterfactuals”. These are things that “could have been worse”. This is not the same thing as “always look on the bright side of life”. It’s not ignoring the bad things that happen, it’s putting them in perspective by realizing that they could have been worse.

Notice how your luck journal differs from a gratitude journal. Gratitude journaling (which is great for other reasons) is about appreciating all the good things in your life, no matter when they happened. Your luck journal is there to help you begin to focus on the lucky things that happened today.

The Science Behind Feeling Lucky

Research in cognitive psychology suggests that our expectations significantly influence what we notice in our environment. When we expect to be lucky, we become more attuned to opportunities.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who consider themselves lucky actually create better circumstances for themselves through four basic principles:

1. They maximize chance opportunities
2. They listen to their intuition
3. They create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations
4. They adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good

(Wiseman’s story in that video about the man who fell down the stairs and broke his leg is a good example of the latter.)

Great Expectations

I can’t leave this section without recommending another wonderful book, The Expectation Effect by David Robson.

Robson’s book covers a huge variety of things, from the placebo and nocebo effects, to how expectations can affect how long it takes to digest food and how full you feel after eating.

But the key take-home message when you combine both books is that if you expect to be lucky, you will feel lucky, and if you feel lucky you will behave in ways that benefit you in the long run.

Revenge of The Backwards Law

The backwards law says that if you focus on what you don’t have, you can never get enough of it (success, money, love, fame, squid, etc.). The faster you go, the farther out your goal becomes.

So if you think of yourself as unlucky, be careful about how you try to change that.

As Yoda always says:

• “Lucky, do not try to be! Recognize that lucky you already are!”

Experiment Details

You can run this experiment yourself if you want. Wiseman has three questionnaires in his book that he used with participants in his Luck School (you can find them in his book):

• A Luck Profile
• A Luck Questionnaire (how lucky you feel)
• A Life Satisfaction Questionnaire

I suspect designing your own questionnaire for measuring how lucky you feel might be just as useful, since what seems lucky to one person may not feel lucky to someone else. I’ll put one that I created below (rather than steal Professor Wiseman’s), but please take this as a starting point or make one up from scratch if you can’t get your hands on Wiseman’s excellent book.

To run a self-experiment, you need to have a hypothesis and a way of measuring things.

Experimental Hypothesis:

• If I spend 3 minutes a day keeping my luck journal, I will increase my score on my Luck Questionnaire.

Experimental Procedure:

• Spend 3 minutes a day keeping a luck journal for 30 days.
• Take the Luck Questionnaire at the beginning and end of the 30 days.
• Compare the scores.

Sample Luck Questionnaire

Instructions: For each statement below, write down how much you agree with it on a scale from -5 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Consider your overall experiences when responding.

Please score each statement based on your personal experiences. Once you’ve filled out the form, sum the scores for each statement and divide by 10. The higher the number, the more lucky you currently feel.

Afterthoughts

This may seem like a peculiar time to talk about luck, if you are as worried as I am (and many of us are) about what the future holds.

I think that if we all work together, we can make sure things work out better than they would if we all passively wait for someone else to do something.

If we’re lucky.

Additional Reading

For more excellent quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, look here.

Related Books:

• The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman
• Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
• The Expectation Effect by David Robson
• Luck: The Brilliant Randomness Of Everyday Life by Nicholas Rescher
• Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank