How to Be Lucky

The unluckiest thing imaginable happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi. On August 6th, 1945, he was in Hiroshima for a business trip when the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. He survived, but with severe burns and a damaged eardrum.

In the chaos that followed, Yamaguchi made his way back home for medical treatment. Unfortunately for him, his home was in Nagasaki, where the second nuclear bomb fell just three days later. And, as luck would have it, Yamaguchi once again found himself too close to the epicenter of the explosion. He survived the second attack with further injuries and the kind of trauma most people couldn't withstand once, let alone twice.

These are the only two times a nuclear bomb has ever been used in war. Let's pause for a moment to consider: Do we think Yamaguchi was extraordinarily unlucky? Or, in a strange way, extraordinarily lucky to have lived through such a unique time in history?

The answer will depend on your perspective. Even the definition of “lucky” can shift from a mysterious, external force to a largely predictable outcome of people's mindsets and behaviors.

And indeed, while Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of the few people recognized as a double hibakusha—yes, there is a Japanese term for survivors of both atomic bombings—he went on to live a long and purposeful life. He died at the age of 93, after decades spent advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament.

The anatomy of a lucky person

It's tempting to view luck as some kind of lottery ticket, where you're either blessed by the universe or you aren’t.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying people who self-identified as exceptionally lucky or unlucky. His findings, detailed in his book The Luck Factor, point to the opposite, however: Lucky people generate their own good fortune through basic psychological principles.

One of the biggest differences between lucky and unlucky people is in the way they pay attention. Wiseman found that people who consider themselves unlucky tend to have more anxiety, and anxiety tends to be bad news as far as luck is concerned because it forces people to focus intensely on the specific task at hand. This narrow focus causes people to miss unexpected opportunities. For example, a more relaxed mindset would have allowed them to notice the $20 bill on the sidewalk, participate in a chance encounter at a coffee shop, or take advantage of an unscheduled opportunity that defies their original plan.

Lucky people also rely on a particular kind of optimism that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect a social interaction to go well, you will naturally smile more, speak more engagingly, and stand taller. Other people respond in kind, and this makes the interaction go well. Meanwhile, the “unlucky” person, expecting rejection, withdraws, and in doing so, virtually guarantees the very rejection they feared.

And, while bad events happen to all people, the “lucky” among us have a way of turning the negative into a positive. The literal equivalent of “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” some people view setbacks as a temporary situation or a learning opportunity that may contribute to them being lucky some other time. This resilience also protects them from the downward spiral that could otherwise shut down future efforts and bring on more misfortune.

Manufacturing more luck

If we accept that luck is less about destiny and more about behavior, the implication is surprisingly empowering. You can train yourself to be luckier—not in a magical sense, but in a practical, behavioral one. This requires a small but important step: shifting from an external locus of control—waiting for the universe to deliver the windfall—to an internal one, in which you yourself engineer the conditions for good things to happen.

Lucky people do this almost instinctively. They treat the unknown not as a threat but as a laboratory. New situations, chance encounters, and unexpected disruptions are just experiments to run. The more experiments you run, the more surface area you create for luck to land.

Remember the phrase “make your own luck”? In practice, that’s exactly what lucky people do. They place more bets, start more conversations, follow more hunches, and recover faster from things that don’t work.

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Living in Hope Amid Uncertainty

A practical way to manufacture more luck is to add a bit of variety to your life. If you talk to the same people, eat at the same places, and walk the same route every day, you’ve mathematically minimized your chances of a serendipitous encounter. To catch a lucky break, you have to actually be in the path of one. Wiseman suggests small, low-stakes disruptions: Take a different route home, linger a moment longer at the coffee shop, say hello to a person you usually ignore. These tiny deviations crack the door open just enough for something unexpected to slip in.

Another way to court luck is to retrain your attention. One of Wiseman’s most successful interventions at his “luck school” was the “luck diary.” Each evening, participants wrote down one positive or fortunate thing that happened that day. It sounds almost too simple, but it works the same way gratitude exercises do. When you know you’ll have to record a “lucky moment” later, your brain starts scanning for them throughout the day.

Increasing your luck, then, is really about cultivating a kind of “resilient expectancy,” or assuming good things will happen, and when they don’t, immediately looking for the angle that still moves you forward. Luck does demand a little initiative. There’s an old joke in which a man prays to God every night, “Please let me win the lottery.” After years of this, God finally answers, “I’m trying, but you’ve got to buy a ticket.”

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