I recently read What to Do When It’s Your Turn by Seth Godin. One chapter in particular caught my eye. It’s titled “Luck School.” The chapter mentions the work of Richard Wiseman and his book called The Luck Factor.
Wiseman dug into the science behind “luck.” He concluded that lucky individuals create their own good fortune through four factors:
“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.”
These are all skills we can practice.
We can practice noticing opportunities and grading our predictions. Businesses provide an easy proxy. Read TechCrunch or peruse AngelList. Make predictions about which companies will survive (and why). Check back in a year and see if you were right.
We can create chance opportunities by shipping projects out into the world. Justin Jackson is a great model when it comes to this.
Listening to your intuition takes skill. It doesn’t happen when you’re frantically working. It happens during quiet periods where you have time to think. Build that time into your day.
We can create positive expectations. We can practice envisioning all the ways this can go right.
We can adopt a growth mindset and approach disappointing outcomes as learning experiences. We can practice getting back up to bat.