The Science Behind Making Your Own Luck

Over the course of roughly three-hundred days bridging 1995 and 1996, Brad Herzog and his wife, Amy, crisscrossed America in a Winnebago on a forty-eight-state journey. During that epic road trip, Brad wrote the first of three travel memoirs, States of Mind, about their visits to eighteen tiny American towns. He navigated the publishing gauntlet and eventually landed a book contract with a small publisher in North Carolina. Over the first ten months, sales were slow, selling just a few hundred copies. Herzog writes a lot and says, “Every subject that I write about teaches me about my world. Writing is a constant education. So I’ve learned a lot of stuff.”

In the spring of 2000, Herzog wound up as a contestant on the TV quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” which was, at the time, the number one show on television. He earned a spot on Millionaire by correctly answering eight trivia questions during a phone tryout, then won the “Fastest Finger” round — by 130 milliseconds. On the show, he reached $64,000 in winnings when Regis Philbin, the show’s host, asked Herzog about his book.

Within twenty-four hours of the show’s airing, sales of his book took off. Soon after, he found himself chatting with Oprah and for a short time, States of Mind was the number two best-selling book on Amazon.

Engineering Your Own Luck

Some might say Herzog got a lucky break.

Dr. Richard Wiseman would probably disagree. He’s professor in public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. After a decade-long exhaustive research involving thousands of experiments, Wiseman found that “lucky” people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles:

They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

If you asked him, he’d likely say that luck had nothing to do with Herzog’s success — or the success of most any other person.

“And so it is with luck,” Wiseman notes, “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs.”

An Experiment in Getting Lucky

One of the experiments Wiseman carried out involved attempting to discover if lucky people consistently encounter opportunities whereas unlucky people do not — and whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

He gave his control group of lucky and unlucky people a newspaper and asked them to identify the number of photographs it contained. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, but the lucky people took much less time — just seconds. How was this possible? Because, at the top of the second page of the newspaper, a half-page message in type that was over two inches tall read:

“Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

The message was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people were too busy looking for photographs and missed it. Wiseman adds, “Just for fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper. This one announced: “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” But even then, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

According to Wiseman, personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much tenser and anxious than lucky people. And research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected. “Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore, see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

While luck is generally thought to be an external force, Wiseman believes it’s possible to make your own luck. "To a very large extent, lucky and unlucky people are responsible for much of the good and bad fortune they encounter." He found through his research that lucky people engage in behaviors that open them up to new experiences.

They are generally extroverted, they talk to lots of people, attract people to them, and maintain a solid network. In contrast, unlucky people spend more time alone and they embrace routines.

Thomas Jefferson is noted for saying, “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” In 1930, then forty-year-old Harland Sanders was operating a service station in Corbin, Kentucky where he began cooking what he called, “home meal replacements.” Twenty-five years of work later, Colonel Sanders launched the franchise that would become known Kentucky Fried Chicken. Within ten years, he had 600 KFC franchises and in 1964 sold it to a group of investors for $2 million. He was seventy-four when he finally “got lucky.”

Do You Feel Lucky?



In one of the most misquoted movie lines ever, Clint Eastwood plays a cop who asks a would-be bank robber if he feels lucky. Eastwood’s character had just shot multiple rounds from his handgun and had it pointed at the robber — who’s eyeing his rifle inches away.

“I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Unlike the unsuccessful bank robber in the Eastwood film, lucky people expect to be lucky. Wiseman found they are optimistic and have higher expectations from life. They are confident about their future and it becomes self-fulfilling prophecies. Conversely, when lucky people experience misfortune, their coping mechanisms are very different from unlucky people. Instead of dwelling on a bad experience, they try to find something positive on which to focus.

Wiseman notes that research suggests athletes who win bronze medals are actually happier than those who win silver medals. He says the reason for this has to do with the way in which the athletes think about their performance. The silver medalists focus on the notion that if they had performed slightly better, then they would have perhaps won a gold medal. In contrast, the bronze medalists focus on the thought that if they had performed slightly worse, then they wouldn’t have won anything at all.

Learning How to Be Lucky

As a result of Wiseman’s research, he believes that luck can be taught. Well, sort of.

As an experiment, he created a “luck” school in which a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers spent a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. He says the results were dramatic — eighty percent of the participants claimed to be happier, more satisfied with their lives, and, of course, luckier.

Wiseman notes that there are three techniques that can help maximize good fortune:

  • Learn to trust your intuition: Wiseman says that “unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches.”
  • Try something new: Wiseman says that “unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives.”
  • Look on the bright side: Wiseman notes that “lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse.”

Lucille Ball, creator, and co-star of The I Love Lucy Show, summed it nicely many years ago when she remarked, “Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work — and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.”