Luck is just another skill.

As an expression of humility, one when being asked “What do you think are the key factors to your success?” would unconsciously crack a smile and reluctantly boil his success down to an answer that has rooted for a long time in our mind: “It’s just luck”

As a pre-programmed reaction, we would laugh assuming the man just does not want to share his tip, without opening up our mind to accept an exotic term that:

Luck is a skill itself.

An academic or not so academic dictionary would describe luck with a definition as old as the hills:

• Success that you have by chance and not because of anything that you do (Macmillan Dictionary)
• Good things that happen to you by chance, not because of your own efforts or abilities (Oxford Learners’ Dictionary)
• Only getting wet when you should have drowned. (Urban Dictionary)

But as the saying goes “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade if you are thirsty, sell them if you need money, give them to a friend if you need friendship” — Giang Nguyen.

When the definition does not serve you well, change it. I would refer those antique definitions to Magic, not luck, as luck for me has a different formula:

Luck = Ability ? Opportunity

Putting it down to memorable phases, I would suggest some sayings that I think would be critical thought about luck:

• Fortune favors the prepared mind — Louis Pasteur
• LUCK = Laboring Under Correct Knowledge

Luck = Ability ? Opportunity

My setting out to investigate luck resulted from my own case of the same situation I mentioned in the opening of this article. I got an A in Logic, and when my friends asked me how I could do that when they struggled to fill their exam paper with all their mind could serve, I answered with the same old thing: “Luck, babe”. After that unconscious saying, I wondered, why luck?

Remember all the times you had exams? You would spend some time revising your lessons. You would not have enough time to stuff all 5 chapters into your limited brain with limited time so you decided to deep down into 2 chapters only. If the exam came with 3 chapters you had not revised, you would boil it down to your fault of laziness. If the exam came with 2 chapters you had rigorously revised, you would do the same old thing — “Luck, babe”

Therefore luck is not something you have not because of anything you do. It is the by-product of your uncounted preparation — revision of 2 chapters. In this situation, you had the ability to score well in these 2 chapters, and the opportunity was that the exam came directly with 2 chapters you mastered. Same thing happened to other stories, like Evan Spiegel had the ability to run a business and he met an opportunity — a business idea, or when Captain America had the ability to perform soldier potentials and it met the opportunity of his meeting with the scientist behind the Super Hero Program. I would not walk out of the exam room with a smile if I did not revise 2 chapters. If I managed to complete my exam without revision, but by copying my friend’s work, I would say it’s because I have the ability to talk my friend into giving me the answers.

Luck, therefore, has to deal with both abillity and opportunity, not something you could receive effortlessly as if it falls down from sky.

Your roles in luck: Receiver — Reactor

As luck is the moment your ability meets your opportunity, your roles in “luck moments” may differ depending on your actions. The moment you see the opportunity is the moment you are the Receiver — you receive it. If you do nothing, then nothing happens. But if you perform actions, you become the Reactor — you seize the opportunity. The moment you see your actions work, you realize luck. It’s a linear process of luck.

Receive — React — Realize

Take into account my exam example, I saw the opportunity of the exam coming in 2 chapters (though with small chances), I took action — revising 2 chapters and the moment my action worked was the moment I screamed out — Luck.

At this point, you’ll ask “But how to see opportunity, seize opportunity and act wisely to have luck?”

Dr Richard Wiseman at Hertfordshire University once carried out research to investigate luck. One of his experiment was that he gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

After some of further cases he tried (you could read about them here), he concluded: “My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

1/ Noticing and creating chance opportunities:

Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

The point here is to be open minded, welcomed for variety, challenges and difference. You barely see luck if you spend your life going to work then going home at a scheduled time. Take other time going to conferences, workshops, meeting new people, talking to new people, doing different work, and you might run into an interesting opportunity.

But running into an opportunity does not create luck until you react to it. There are four situations related to the moment of luck, as I could map out:

I assume you would not read my article if you are in the bottom left quadrant — the Do nothing. If you are in that quadrant, I have not come up with any idea to tell you right now how to move forward.

If you are in the upper left or the bottom right quadrant, then yes you have to take action to move yourself to the upper right — when you see the opportunities well and you could seize them wisely to turn them into luck.

For the upper left quadrant— “I could have done better”, you may want to learn to be more confident and riskier, to take actions faster and gain luck faster, to turn your potential energy into kinetic energy. Even if your actions may turn into bad results, you still learn faster and have experience for your next time of opportunity.

For the bottom right quadrant — who take actions too fast without spotting the right opportunity, you may want to learn how to slow down your decision making process to fully understand the situation and analyze what could be your next steps. Starting a business without rigorously assessing the market and users’ need may be one example of this quadrant.

2/ Listening to intuition:

Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. Gut feelings could act as an alarm bell when making decisions, as for me intuition is made up of our experience, and leveraging both emotional and logical factors could lead you to better decisions — to maximize your reaction to an opportunity.

3/ Creating self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations:

Happiness = expectation — reality

Lucky people always expect to be lucky. A landmark paper by Barbara Fredrickson found that “positive emotions momentarily broaden people’s attention and thinking, enabling them to draw on higher-level connections and a wider-than-usual range of percepts or ideas.”

When our expectation to be lucky is high, we unintentionally develop ourselves to feel positive, and positivity lifts us to hustle harder, to better our skills, to actively widen our knowledge to achieve higher. When we achieve higher, reality is lifted higher, and the happiness gap is narrowed, leading us to the moment of “Luck, babe”

4/ Adopting resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good:

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”― Dalai Lama XIV

Stressing over failures worsens the situation. Lucky people never look on how bad things are, they look on how worse things could be. Instead of complaining about their falling into water and getting wet, they smile at how lucky they are not to be drowned. This positive mindset helps them embrace failures, learn faster from failures and move forward faster to welcome other opportunities to create luck.

So don’t view luck as passive treasure from God, luck is actively made by us if we know how to create it, step by step, to take it under our control.