Luck is just one of those subjects. Just about everybody has an opinion on luck. And they will all go high and far to convince you that they are right.
I am no different 
Some people claim you absolutely can’t control luck, so you shouldn’t even bother trying. Others say you can definitely create your own luck – but they don’t give you any practical tips, or they tell you to create your own luck by working really hard. Sure, working hard gives results, but that’s not creating your own luck.
In fact, creating your own luck is really simple. Just do little things that ALLOW the world to make you lucky.
My first experiences
I first came across the principle of creating your own luck when playing the board game Othello. If you don’t know what Othello is, just think about chess. The same principle applies.
I watched experts play, and analyzed their games with computer help. I noticed a funny pattern – the top players didn’t really play more precisely than the lesser players. Their moves were just more TRICKY.
So I tried emulating their style. Instead of making my usual moves, I tried to play moves that made the life just a bit harder for my opponent. And something amazing happened! I started winning some games even against players who were quite a bit better than me!
It worked really simply. I kept looking for chances to give my opponent little opportunities to make a mistake. Nobody who’s even moderately good at Othello should overlook those simple traps. So 9 times out of 10 they wouldn’t work. But every now and then, the opponent WOULD overlook a simple obvious trap! Anybody who was watching would say “Oh, that was just lucky!” But I knew better. I had CREATED my own luck!
And the same applies to creating your own luck in life. You just need to create little opportunities for the world to make you lucky. Sure, it might be lucky that you ended up sitting on the plane next to someone who later turned into your business partner. But if you talk to the person sitting next to you every time, you’re bound to find SOMEONE who enriches your life.
Success comes in lumps
Just recently, I read a great post by Scott H. Young about how success comes in lumps. In there, he explains how success is triggered by key events, even though all the work that came before the triggering event is just as important, if not more.
Similarly, my luck in Othello didn’t just come from that single tricky move that confused my opponent. It came equally much from the dozen tricky moves before that.
And that’s the counter-intuitive thing. You might be tempted to look for the ultimate triggering actions, and eliminate all the ones that don’t trigger huge success. But in fact, all the little actions have a chance to trigger success, it’s just that most of them don’t. Only a few of them will be “lucky”.
It’s the same in blogging. You might be tempted to try to create only excellent posts. After all, those are the ones that trigger huge success in social media. But following that strategy, you would probably agonize over each blog post for a month, tweaking every little bit for perfection, and then find out that most of them still don’t become hugely popular.
Instead, I focus on consistently being good in blogging. By consistently aiming for good posts, I can crank out a lot more of them. Sure, some will turn out average or even awful, but a couple will turn out excellent, and become hugely popular! And I often get surprised by which of my posts get popular – like the one on body language basics. I can’t predict in advance which actions will turn out lucky – but I know that some of them will.
Don’t worry about the critics
Some people will tell you that you can’t create your own luck, so you shouldn’t even bother trying. They do that because they don’t have the courage to take action themselves. And they want you to sit around and do nothing just like them, just in case you might prove them wrong. Don’t worry about people like that. They don’t matter.
What matters is your own life. Creating your own luck.
Creating your own luck in the real world
So how do you create your own luck in the real world?
Just take actions that give the world an opportunity to make you lucky. Actions that have a chance to give you a high payoff, even if it’s not at first obvious how.
Often, these actions will be disguised by the world to look plain and unimportant. Like a dust-covered diamond lying by the side of the road of your life. You wouldn’t even stop and notice it if you didn’t know about it. But if you know there are a lot of dust-covered diamonds on the ground around you, you will keep picking up small dusty rocks and wiping them off, and eventually you will get “lucky”.
For example, you could:
- try new hobbies
- talk to strangers
- start blogging
- think of a topic you care about, then pick up a book on that topic that advises you to do something completely different from what you’ve been doing until now
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, most of the above tips will seem familiar. That’s because I can only think of examples that relate to my own life. If you can think of any examples from your own life on how to create your own luck, feel free to share them in the comments.
If you get out there and start taking little actions that MIGHT just make you lucky, you’ll be surprised at how often you actually DO get lucky! Remember that. YOU create your own luck, and nobody else. Take a couple of small actions, and see for yourself.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks! This is just what I needed to hear right now. Man, that’s just lucky!
Catchy yet misleading title…yet I agree with all of the observations and suggestions. Hmmm, I guess it’s the word LUCK. Luck, Karma, Grace; I would think that luck includes the aspect of that which one has no control over, random… if you win at poker by cheating, lucky? Keep making smart, interesting, engaging, caring, and creative decisions and the outcomes will indeed seem lucky.
jeff
A couple of years ago I bought a book by a psychologist called (I think) “How to be Lucky”. He found a people who self-reported as “very lucky” or “very unlucky” and looked for psychological differences between them. Fascinating.
Yes, the lucky people habitually talked to strangers. They also had a large group of friendly acquaintances, and they’d mention things to them, eg, “I’m looking for a new car. Something cheap to run and under $3000″. Unlucky people didn’t. So who do you think gets to hear about the private sale first?
Lucky people look around more. They set up meetings with the subjects in a cafe, and put a £20 note on the ground outside it. All the lucky people saw it and picked it up. None of the unlucky people did. He theorized that the unlucky people probably wouldn’t see dog mess either – until they stepped in it.
Lucky people tend to have better problem-solving skills. One of the unlucky people had a whole run of car accidents. (“I rear-ended the car in front. The law says it must be my fault for following too close.”) Co-workers suggested refresher driving lessons, but she concluded that the car was jinxed, and sold it. Surprise, surprise, the next car was jinxed, too.
Lucky people are more persistent. If they want to be a pop star and get turned down at the X Factor audition, they don’t give up. They go to another twenty auditions and keep learning and practicing.
I write short stories. Normally I get about one sale for every ten submissions, but some years ago I went through a horrible patch of noting but rejections. Worse, after a while I started to bump into people who said things like, “Oh I used to write. I sold the first few stories no bother, but then I started getting rejected and I never got published again.” You can imagine what that did for my morale!
And then I started asking them, “How long did you go on trying after the rejections started?”
Most of them gave up after two rejections.
So that was obviously something I could do differently, and I steamed on. And on. And on. 87 rejections later — EIGHTY-BLEEDING-SEVEN — I sold another story. And now I’m back to roughly one sale for every ten submissions. And as you may have heard, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was rejected 17 times before it sold. I imagine J. K. Rowling’s rather pleased that she didn’t give up.
Thank you for this inspiring post! I really enjoy reading your ideas, and I had to leave a comment to this one!
I didn´t think about luck in the way you do before. but I think it is the right way. Luck is the 5% chance that became reality. So i´ve you provoke the 5 percent to happen, you are lucky. Smart idea! But there is another important point you didn´t really write about.
I declare myself as an extremly lucky person. The trick is pretty easy:
Your driving your way home from work by car. Let´s say 6 out of 10 traffic lights were red when you arrived. 2 of them were just turning red, in the very moment you were close.
But: 2 of the traffic lights were green. What I do then is saying to myself: “wow, this one is green! I am always so lucky in my life!”
And arriving at home all I remember are those 2 green traffic lights. forget the others.
So this was a pretty easy example, of course there are tons of things I do like that. I just keep on reminding myself about this 1 time in my life when the 5% chance came true.
And not only that. I noticed that it is important to tell other people over and over how incredebly lucky I am. Because in 5% of all the cases the 5% percent chance becomes reality. You just have to keep on reminding yourself on it, and the five percent seem to grow to 20 or more.
I think most of us are lucky, we just have to notice it.
You are truly amazing!! I love everything you write and am positively affected by it every single time. I have emailed several of your posts to my daughter-in-law, etc, I always think, “Gosh! Why didn’t I think of that?!” I wish I could find words to tell you how much your words have meant to me. Often I find so much HOPE in them!!! Thank you so much for what you do. Polly
@Jeff:
That’s the funny thing, things might SEEM lucky if the odds are stacked against you (“what are the odds of THAT happening to me?”). But the odds only seemed stacked against you for someone who doesn’t understand statistics.
For example, I remember a news story some time ago about somebody winning the US national lottery (or something similar, I get fuzzy on the details) not once, but TWICE! The lottery company was throwing around the words like “1 in 14 billion billion chance” and “what are the odds of THAT happening!”. Well, yeah, the chance that ONE PARTICULAR PERSON will win IN TWO PARTICULAR LOTTERY DRAWS might be that. But the chance of SOMEONE winning SOME TWO LOTTERY DRAWS is actually pretty good. I think someone calculated that the chance that SOMEONE will win the lottery twice is about 50-50 over a 7-year period. (probably assuming they keep betting even if they win). So flip a coin right now. Got heads? Somebody will win the lottery twice over the next seven years.
It’s the same with you taking action. But instead of spreading the probability across a lot of people, you spread it across a lot of small actions. Same result. SOME action will get lucky
@Sheila:
Wow, that WAS fanscinating! Thanks for sharing!
And kudos for not giving up even after 87 rejections! That takes balls! (even if you don’t… literally… never mind)
@Robert:
. One of my favorite things to do. Not only do you create more positivity (and thus happiness) in your life (since you forget some of the negative experiences you don’t pay attention to). You also reinforce the behavior that gave you the positive results, to get more success in the future! (If it’s something you can influence. I’m not sure it will work on traffic lights :p)
Ah yes, focusing on the positive