Lucky people create their own opportunities
How lucky are you? An experiment with 400 people on what luck is.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
A few weeks ago, I met a chef who told me the story of how he ended up with 8 restaurants at 36. He said he was just lucky. I disagreed. His superpower was not being afraid to say yes to things that came his way.
I’ve never been a believer of luck because I think it diminishes the consistent hard work required to be successful.
Maybe you agree with me. Or maybe you’ve come across people who work hard but can never catch a break.
What is luck, really?
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, conducted an experiment with 400 people to examine why some people seem lucky and others don’t. He gave both self-identified groups a newspaper and asked them to count how many photos were inside.
Unlucky people took an average of 2 minutes to find 43 photos. Lucky people only took a few seconds. Why?
The second page of the newspaper had a message that took up half the page saying, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Unlucky people tended to miss it. Lucky ones spotted it.
He placed a second large message that said, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The same thing happened. Unlucky people missed it. Lucky ones spotted it.
Personality tests showed that unlucky people were more anxious, which disrupted their ability to notice the unexpected.
His research revealed that lucky people create their own fortune by:
Creating and noticing chance opportunities
Making lucky decisions with intuition
Creating self-fulfilling prophecies
Adopting a resilient attitude
Being lucky doesn’t mean you don’t need to work hard. Working hard doesn’t mean you’ll just get lucky.
💡 What is luck? According to Wiseman:
LUCK IS BEING OPEN TO THE UNEXPECTED.
The luckiest people I know create all their own opportunities. Not because they work harder than everyone else, but because they’re constantly looking around at what’s in front of them. They’re not so focused on one thing that they miss everything else happening around them.
They say yes when opportunities show up. They trust their gut in uncertainty. They believe things will work out. When things don’t go their way, they bounce back quickly.
My chef friend wasn’t just lucky. He was open. Open to conversations with strangers. Open to trying new things in new places. Open to doors that were presented to him even though they were outside his comfort zone. That openness created what he called luck.
Wiseman ended his article with this: “The research… is about encouraging people to move away from a magical way of thinking and toward a more rational view of luck. Perhaps most important of all, it is about using science and skepticism to increase the level of luck, happiness, and success in people’s lives.”
How lucky are you?
Maybe a better question is: How open are you?
You can read more in Richard Wiseman’s article, The Luck Factor.
Till next time,
— Melissa ✌️
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This experiment perfectly captures why some people keep stumbling into oportunities while others miss them entirely. The anxiety link is fascinatin because it shows how our internal state literally shapes what we percieve as available to us. I've noticed this pattern with founders who are so locked into their original plan that they miss obvious pivots staring them down.
Super interesting, I just had a discussion about this with my partner. And we are both think we are «lucky» with the life we have but as well think it’s due to being able to see opportunities and take a risk.