5 ways to live a luckier life, starting tomorrow

Where success is concerned—in whatever way you choose to define success—effort matters. So does skill. Experience. Perseverance. A willingness to do what others will not.

And a little bit of luck: A study published in Physics and Society found that while some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, “almost never do the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.”

Outworking, outthinking, and outlasting other people will definitely improve your odds of success, but still: You need a little luck.

Fortunately, all luck isn’t necessarily random. According to neurologist James Austin in his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty, there are four basic types of luck, and three of them you at least partly control:

Blind luck. Opportunity, or outcome, without effort. Unforeseen, and more important, uncontrollable. Counting on blind luck? Good luck with that.

Luck from motion. Taking action. Trying things. Doing things. Like when I cold-emailed someone to tell them I admired their work. (Which, although I couldn’t have predicted it, nor intended it to happen, wound up landing me one of my most lucrative and fulfilling ghostwriting gigs.)

You can’t luck into meeting the right person unless you meet a number of people; the more people you meet, the more your odds of getting lucky increase. “Lucking” into meeting the right person is just one form of luck from motion.

Because luck is often found, but it’s almost never found on the literal (or figurative) couch.

Luck from awareness. Spotting—and then seizing—opportunities. Being lucky enough to recognize an opportunity is one thing; you’re only truly lucky if you also possess the skills, experience, resources, etc. required to take advantage of the opportunity. While I was lucky enough to live next door to a cofounder of Rosetta Stone, I didn’t have the foresight—or money—to invest.

Even so, according to an experiment described by Richard Wiseman in The Luck Factor, people who consider themselves lucky tend to spot and seize more opportunities than people who consider themselves unlucky.

Oddly enough, simply believing you’re lucky is causal. In the experiment, people who saw themselves as lucky spotted an opportunity much more quickly—in some cases, people who saw themselves as unlucky never spotted it—and were also quicker to believe it actually was an opportunity, and act on it.

The difference was self-perception, not access to opportunity. The key is to pay attention, and believe that paying attention will make a difference.

Because it will.

Luck from uniqueness. Austin says this involves “distinctive, if not eccentric, hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” (think actions).

Keep in mind you don’t have to be a little wacky to be unique. I’m decidedly average in all things. But the fact that I know a lot about Formula 1, and Australian rules football, and construction, and Henry VIII’s six wives turned a chance meeting in an airport lounge into an hourlong conversation that sparked a decades-long, mutually beneficial professional and personal relationship.

It was partly blind luck I ran into that person. But I was also in motion. And I did quickly realize he was a fascinating conversationalist. And the fact that we share a fairly esoteric blend of interests made us both distinctive, at least to each other.

Bottom line? If you want to get luckier, meet more people. Do more things. Try more things. Try more unusual things. Be generous, especially with congratulations and praise.

And when you see an opportunity, don’t be afraid to ask. Luck sometimes results from the right person saying yes: to your idea, to your startup, to your pitch, to your proposal, to your request.

But no one says yes unless you ask. As Steve Jobs said, “Most people never ask, and that’s what separates, sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”

You can’t control blind luck. But you can, to some degree, control the other forms of luck. What you can control is how you respond to chance or circumstance.

And, most important, how often you put yourself into a position to be lucky.

—Inc.