How to Feel Lucky

Define luck for yourself. What is good luck for you? Your dreams and desires are the roots of the concept of "luck". One person might feel most lucky in acing an exam, another person in getting his cancer into remission, while another person in scoring her first hole in one. Feeling lucky is to identify your deep desires, which is different from person to person. Identifying and amplify your desires will give yourself a better chance of attaining your goals and getting what you want. Luck reflects faith in obtaining these goals.

• If you feel unlucky, may be because you have not identified what it is you want to be doing, what you want out of life, and what you can do to attain it. The first step in getting somewhere is deciding where you want to go.
• For some people, it might be smarter to start with a five-year plan, while others might need to start smaller. What do you want today? What do you want to get out of Wednesday? Make this a daily exercise.
• Focus on things that will improve your lot in life on a deep emotional level, not just a superficial one. But you will maximize your luck if you work on not just the one-in-a-million chance, but also take advantage of the little opportunities to fulfill your desires. For example, if you want to be financially secure, you may trust your luck in making it happen. Wanting to win the lottery is all well and good--someone has to win, after all! But do not invest heavily in lottery tickets; find opportunities to save money and invest as well!
• Feeling unlucky can happen because of a setback or delay or even failure in your goals. You get laid off, for instance. Or get into a car accident. Your strawberry crop fails. Recognize that life is not a constant string of successes. But focusing on positive steps (however tiny) will ensure you will see your opportunities and things to be grateful about rather than dwelling on things that happen that work against us.

Be bold. People who feel lucky put themselves in situations which face the possibility of failure. It takes courage and a positive attitude that accepts failure as a momentary setback. Instead of wasting time coming up with reasons to avoid tough situations or challenging scenarios, people who feel luck come up with reasons to act, to confront, and to succeed.

• Being bold does not mean reckless. Put your faith in luck, but there is a reason for seat belts in vehicles.
• An old saying goes, "Going into a situation expecting to fail is the best way to ensure failure."
• The "unlucky" are often experts in making themselves comfortable and safe, but achieve little. Put yourself out there and give yourself the chance to succeed. But it requires that you preserve the chance of failure. Removing any chance of failure takes away the possibility of succeeding as well. Say yes instead of no.

See challenges as opportunities to succeed. You've just been offered an exciting but intimidating new responsibility at work? Take it with enthusiasm. You've been asked to speak in front of a crowd of people? Write a great speech. You've been tasked with picking up a famous artist from the airport? Chat 'em up. Treat intimidating moments as chances to make your own luck, not as hopeless obstacles.^[1]

• It may seem corny, but try talking yourself up. Make a psych-up playlist to play before you show up for work every day, or have to do something that scares you. "Up Above My Head" by Sister Rosetta never made anyone feel unlucky.

Take advantage of good fortune. Unlucky people chalk up good fortune to accident, using good luck as a chance to self-deprecate, or to make excuses. Lucky people take good fortunate and turn it into more good fortune. In the newspaper experiment Wiseman conducted, the only difference between the lucky and the unlucky was that the lucky people kept an eye out for advantage, fortune, and luck, and the unlucky–given the exact same advantage–missed it.

Take control of situations. Francis Ford Coppola, award-winning filmmaker of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather is famous for his unusual ways of making movies, which isn't really very strange at all. When he wants to make a movie, he just starts making a movie. No script, actors, or studio support? Doesn't matter. He's got an idea and doesn't let anyone get in his way. Respect yourself enough to give your wants and your desires precedence over other concerns.

• Don't say "I wonder if I'll be allowed to do this," but say "Who's going to stop me?" Giving yourself the responsibility to succeed gives you the ability to succeed. Give yourself the position of control, not other people who are supposedly keeping you from getting what you want.
• Don't wait around for permission to do things. Take what you want. At work, don't write up a project proposal for approval, just do your project and show off the results. Don't wait to get an outline of your book put together so you can get an advance from a publisher and write it, just start writing it.

Stop thinking and start feeling. Lucky people have learned to respect their intuitions, hunches, and gut instincts. If you've got a tendency to overanalyze situations and find reasons to feel slighted, offended, or unlucky, learn to listen to your gut instead.

• Try this experiment: Next time you've got to make an important decision, let yourself make it instantaneously. Go with your fastest gut reaction and don't give yourself the chance to rethink it. It just occurred to you that you're not in love with your partner? Break up. Now. You just got the urge to quit your job and volunteer on an organic grape vineyard for a couple months? Put in your papers. Make it happen.

Work hard. Coppola still had to make those movies he blundered into. That meant hundreds of hours of dull slogging through the jungle in Vietnam, and early mornings dealing with Marlon Brando's weirdness, and hundreds of reels of film to edit. But he threw himself into it. Sow the seeds of luck with labor. Work hard.

• Hard workers open up opportunities and advantages because their results are that much better than everyone else's. If you're working twice as hard at work, your work will be twice as good, and you'll feel twice as lucky for having done it.
• Try to focus on doing one thing at a time and doing it extremely well. On Monday, don't worry about everything you've got to do for the rest of the week. Try not to even think about what you've got to do in the afternoon. Just think about this moment, right now, and finishing what you've started.