Weekly Share: Richard Wiseman, How to Become Luckier

British Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman studied what makes some people luckier than others. Turns out lucky people often create their luck.

Lucky people notice opportunities. They have a general end goal in mind, and while they may not know how to get to it, they are very flexible in identifying opportunities and following them.

Lucky people follow their intuition. They make decisions by listening to their intuition and never ignoring a bad feeling.

Lucky people are optimists. They create self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations (I think about it as operating out of trust instead of fear).

Lucky people are resilient. They transform failure or hardship, which others might call “bad luck”, into opportunity by asking “what’s in it for me?”.

One of the ways to create luck in your life is to keep a “lucky journal”: Write down at least one “lucky” thing that happened to you every day. As you see evidence of “good luck” in your life, you believe it more, people around you see it more and you create a virtuous “luck” cycle.

The luck discussion is quite short, but if you like wide-ranging conversations listen to Ali Abdaal’s interview with Professor Wiseman (YouTube, Apple, Spotify). Speaking of noticing opportunities, Ali is an interesting character himself: A Cambridge-educated medical doctor who quit medicine to become a full-time YouTuber. As I write this, his main channel has nearly 3.5M subscribers.

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