Can you make yourself luckier?

Earlier this month, I met someone in their thirties who had become extraordinarily wealthy.

They had been one of the first five people to come to Europe to help establish the operations of what is now an enormous American company.

They were clearly intelligent and capable. But when the conversation turned to how they had accumulated their wealth, they paused.  

"Pure luck."

I find that concept interesting.

After all, plenty of intelligent, hardworking people spend their entire working lives without accumulating anything like that level of wealth.

Was this person simply fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time?

And, more importantly, if luck can make such an enormous difference to our lives, is there anything we can do to become luckier?

It turns out psychologists have spent quite a lot of time thinking about precisely that question.

Are some people genuinely luckier than others? What about the opposite?

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, spent years studying people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky.

He wanted to understand whether their experiences were entirely down to chance or whether something about their behaviour made good fortune more likely.

His research identified some interesting differences.

People who considered themselves lucky tended to be more open to unfamiliar experiences, more willing to meet new people and better at noticing unexpected opportunities.

Those who considered themselves unlucky were often more focused on what they expected to happen, sometimes overlooking opportunities that appeared along the way.

Wiseman concluded that lucky people frequently help create their own good fortune through their behaviour. And if not their behaviour, their perception of what was happening to them. 

It's worth being cautious about the findings. Studying people who already believe themselves lucky doesn't establish that their behaviour caused their success.

Nevertheless, the underlying idea is intriguing.

Perhaps what we call luck is sometimes the consequence of having created more opportunities for something fortunate to happen.

Why the people you barely know might change your life

One particularly compelling piece of evidence comes from research published in Science in 2022.

Researchers studied experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users, examining how different types of professional relationships influenced job mobility.

Their findings supported a fascinating idea: relatively weak social connections can be more valuable for finding new employment than close relationships.

Not necessarily complete strangers, but people we know well enough to have a connection with, without moving in exactly the same circles.

Why?

Because our close friends and colleagues often know much the same people and have access to much the same information as we do.

More distant connections introduce us to opportunities we might otherwise never encounter.

The researchers found that the relationship wasn't entirely straightforward and varied between industries. But the broader finding was significant.

Expanding our networks can genuinely increase our exposure to opportunities.

Think about the implications.

A conversation with someone you don't know particularly well could introduce you to a business, an opportunity or an idea that changes the direction of your career.

And you might never have had that conversation if you'd stuck exclusively to the people and places you already knew.

Can you plan to be lucky?

In 1999, researchers Kathleen Mitchell, Al Levin and John Krumboltz introduced a concept called planned happenstance.

Their argument was that unexpected events play such an important role in our careers that we should stop treating them as interruptions to a carefully constructed plan.

Instead, we should deliberately create circumstances in which unexpected opportunities can arise.

Be curious. Try unfamiliar things. Meet different people. Remain flexible when circumstances change.

Not because these activities guarantee success, but because they increase the number of possible directions life might take.

I rather like that distinction.

You cannot schedule a fortunate coincidence for next Thursday.

But you can arrange your life so that next Thursday is more likely to contain something unexpected.

And you can develop the skills, experience and confidence to recognise an opportunity when it appears.

But let's not confuse luck with merit

Returning to the person I met, I suspect their success involved a combination of ability, hard work, judgement and extraordinary timing.

They joined a company at precisely the right stage of its development.

Perhaps a slightly different decision, a different employer or a different economic environment would have produced an entirely different result.

That doesn't diminish their achievements.

Equally, recognising the importance of luck should make us cautious about assuming that people who haven't achieved comparable financial success simply haven't worked hard enough.

Opportunity isn't distributed evenly.

Our starting circumstances, education, networks and financial security all influence which risks we can afford to take.

And sometimes, despite doing everything sensibly, things simply don't work out.

But the encouraging part is that luck isn't necessarily an entirely passive experience.

Giving luck more opportunities

Financial planning is usually about reducing uncertainty.

We diversify investments, build financial reserves and try to protect ourselves against things not going according to plan.

And rightly so.

But there's another side to financial security that I think deserves more attention.

Having a sound financial position can give us the freedom to take opportunities we couldn't otherwise afford to consider.

Changing careers. Starting a business. Taking time away to study something new. Exploring an idea without needing it to succeed immediately.

These decisions involve uncertainty, and not all will work out.

But financial independence isn't simply about having enough money to stop working.

It's also about having more freedom to decide what happens next.

We cannot manufacture the extraordinary good fortune that helped someone become wealthy in their thirties.

But we can be more curious, broaden our experiences, invest in relationships and occasionally venture beyond what's familiar.

We can make ourselves ready for opportunities whose existence we don't yet know about.

And perhaps that's the most useful conclusion of all.

You can't guarantee that life will deal you a lucky hand. But you can give yourself more chances to play one.

‍