The Four Principles of Luck
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
After interviewing hundreds of people who described themselves as consistently lucky or unlucky, Richard Wiseman found that self-described lucky people were not statistically blessed — they thought and behaved differently in four measurable ways. They stayed open and flexible about the route to their goals, so they noticed opportunities others walked past. They treated gut feelings as an alarm bell worth acting on. They expected things to work out, which functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy that kept them going through failure. And, most importantly in Wiseman's view, they were resilient: when something bad happened they refused to label it bad luck and looked for what might come from it. Because these are behaviours rather than traits, they can be trained and tested with interventions.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Fix the destination, stay loose on the route
Decide the end point you want, then hold the path to it lightly. Lucky people knew roughly where they wanted to end up but watched which way the wind was blowing and set sail accordingly, which kept them able to take opportunities as they appeared.
Pro tip Write the outcome you want, not the job title or route that supposedly delivers it.
- 2
Treat intuition as an alarm bell
When you get a gut feeling about a person, project or decision, do not override it as noise. Lucky people took the feeling seriously and acted on it rather than talking themselves out of it.
- 3
Default to optimism about outcomes
Expect good fortune and keep going after setbacks. Wiseman found this behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy: continuing in the face of failure produces more attempts, and more attempts produce more chances of things working out.
Watch out Optimism here means persistence after failure, not denying that the failure happened.
- 4
Refuse the 'bad luck' label
When something goes wrong, do not close the ledger on it. Generate 'it could have been worse' counterfactuals and look for the silver lining, however minimal. Wiseman calls resilience probably the most important of the four principles.
Pro tip Ask 'what could come out of this that I can't see yet?' before deciding an event was bad.
- 5
Grow the network the behaviour creates
Lucky people were happier, had bigger social networks and were always looking for the win-win, so they got offered more opportunities and had people around them when things went wrong. Unlucky people tended to be social isolates. Deliberately widen the circle rather than waiting for it to widen.
In the wild
One participant in the lucky group came in for two interviews. Between them he fell down the stairs and broke his leg, arriving at the second session in a cast. Wiseman suggested he probably did not feel so lucky now. The man's answer was that you never know the impact of something like this — last time he went into hospital he fell in love with a nurse there and they had been happily married 25 years later. He refused to call the broken leg bad luck because he could not yet see what would come from it.
→ Demonstrated the resilience principle: the same event is coded as neutral or good rather than unlucky, keeping the person open to what follows.
At 17 or 18, Wiseman had his bag with all his magic props stolen in Times Square, then had to perform at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles with nothing. Sitting in a restaurant in tears the day before, a woman asked what was wrong, then told him he was focusing on what he could not do and asked what show he could do tomorrow. Something flipped. He listed what was still possible, built a show from that, went out and performed it, and it was fine.
→ A chance meeting he says influenced him more than the performance itself, and part of why he later studied luck.
Common mistakes
Locking onto one fixed career path
Wiseman argues opportunities are presented all the time, and it is easy to decide 'I'm going to be a medic' or 'a magician' and lock in. Once you lock into a single path you stop seeing other opportunities and other ways of thinking and doing.
Labelling an event as bad luck immediately
Bad things are to a large extent subjective. Deciding straight away that something was bad luck starts a vicious cycle: you consider yourself unlucky, stop taking opportunities, and other people reinforce that identity back at you.
Treating luck as an innate trait
Wiseman is explicitly uninterested in the nature end of things — the parts that cannot change. Assuming luck is fixed removes the reason to run any of the interventions that were shown to shift behaviour and perception.
From the transcript
“So, we have the open to opportunities and when there's opportunities come along, they make the most of them.”
“And fourth, I think it's probably the most important principle, uh they're extremely resilient. So, when bad things happen, they could bounce back.”
“He said, "You never know the impact of something like this."”
From the episode
Lessons in Happiness, Side Hustles, Self-Care, Productivity, Luck and Business - Season 3 Round Up
Season 3 Round Up