In 1993, Richard Wiseman placed an ad in a British newspaper. He was looking for people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky — or exceptionally unlucky. Hundreds responded. And over the next 10 years, Wiseman studied them all.
He gave them personality tests, diaries, and experiments. He observed how they moved through the world. He tracked their decisions, their habits, and their outcomes. And by the end, the psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire had arrived at a conclusion that upended everything most people believe about fortune.
Luck, Wiseman found, is not something that happens to you. It’s something you do.
“I discovered that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles,” Wiseman wrote in The Luck Factor. “They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”
Four behaviors. All of them learnable. None of them mystical.
The Newspaper Experiment
Wiseman’s most famous experiment was deceptively simple. He gave both lucky and unlucky participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside. The unlucky people took about two minutes. The lucky people took seconds.
Why? Because on page two, Wiseman had placed a half-page message in large type: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The unlucky people missed it. They were so focused on the task — counting photos — that they couldn’t see the shortcut staring them in the face.
Halfway through the paper, Wiseman had placed another message: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The unlucky people missed that one too.
This wasn’t about intelligence. The unlucky participants were just as smart as the lucky ones. The difference was attentional style. Lucky people maintain a broader focus. They notice things in the periphery. Unlucky people are narrower, more anxious, more tightly focused on what they’re looking for — which means they miss what they’re not looking for.
This has massive implications for how you spot opportunities at work. If you’re heads-down on a task, tunnel-visioned on your KPIs, you might be the person who misses the $250 message on page 14.
Principle 1: Maximize Chance Opportunities
Wiseman found that lucky people structure their lives to increase the probability of unexpected encounters. They have larger social networks. They introduce variety into their routines. They’re open to new experiences even when — especially when — there’s no obvious payoff.
“Lucky people build and maintain a strong network of luck,” Wiseman wrote. They talk to strangers. They say yes to invitations that seem irrelevant. They vary their route to work, pick up magazines outside their field, attend events that have nothing to do with their job.
This isn’t random behavior. It’s a strategy for increasing surface area with chance. The more diverse your inputs, the more likely you are to stumble onto something valuable. It’s the same principle behind the compounding effect of small changes — tiny variations in routine accumulate into dramatically different outcomes over time.
Wiseman measured this directly. Lucky people scored significantly higher on the personality trait of extraversion — not because luck requires being outgoing, but because social engagement creates more opportunities for fortunate encounters.
Principle 2: Listen to Your Intuition
This one surprised Wiseman. Lucky people reported paying more attention to gut feelings when making decisions. They didn’t ignore analytical thinking, but they gave intuition a seat at the table.
“Almost 90 percent of lucky people said that they trusted their intuition when it came to personal relationships,” Wiseman found, “and almost 80 percent said it played a vital role in their career choices.”
The unlucky people? They tended to overthink. They ruminated. They second-guessed themselves into paralysis.
Wiseman’s interpretation was that intuition isn’t magic. It’s pattern recognition operating below conscious awareness. Lucky people have learned to trust this signal. Unlucky people have learned to suppress it.
The practical application: when you’ve done your analysis and the numbers look right but something feels off, don’t dismiss that feeling. And when an opportunity appears that doesn’t fit your plan but resonates on a gut level, give it serious consideration.
Principle 3: Expect Good Fortune
Lucky people in Wiseman’s study expected things to work out. Not in a delusional way. They didn’t deny problems or ignore risks. But their default assumption was positive.
Wiseman found that these expectations became self-fulfilling prophecies. Lucky people persisted longer because they expected success. They attempted more things because they expected favorable outcomes. They interacted with others more warmly because they expected to be liked — and people responded in kind.
Unlucky people operated from the opposite assumption. They expected failure, which made them defensive, risk-averse, and less engaging. Other people picked up on this energy and responded accordingly, confirming the unlucky person’s worldview.
“Lucky people’s expectations about the future help them fulfill their dreams and ambitions,” Wiseman wrote. “They expect their interactions with others to be lucky and successful, and those expectations tend to become self-fulfilling.”
This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s a calibrated optimism that shapes behavior in measurable ways. You attempt more, persist longer, and engage more openly — all of which increase the statistical likelihood of good outcomes.
Principle 4: Turn Bad Luck Into Good
This was the principle that separated Wiseman’s luckiest subjects from everyone else. When bad things happened — and bad things happened to everyone — lucky people responded differently.
They spontaneously imagined how things could have been worse. They didn’t dwell on the negative event. They took control of the situation and looked for the lesson or the opportunity embedded in the setback.
Wiseman interviewed a woman who had broken her leg in a fall. Instead of lamenting her bad luck, she said: “I could have broken my neck.” Another participant lost his job and immediately reframed it as the push he needed to start the business he’d been dreaming about for years.
“Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune,” Wiseman wrote. “They are convinced that any ill fortune in their life will, in the long run, work out for the best.”
This isn’t denial. It’s cognitive reframing — a well-documented psychological technique that shapes how events affect your subsequent behavior. The person who sees a setback as temporary and instructive bounces back faster than the person who sees it as permanent and defining.
Can You Teach Luck?
Wiseman didn’t just study lucky people. He ran an experiment to find out if unlucky people could learn these four behaviors.
He recruited a group of self-identified unlucky participants and put them through a “luck school” — a series of exercises designed to build each of the four principles. They practiced broadening their attention. They worked on listening to intuition. They developed positive expectation habits. They rehearsed reframing techniques.
The results were remarkable. After one month, 80 percent of the participants reported that they felt luckier. But it wasn’t just a feeling. They reported measurable improvements in their lives — better relationships, more opportunities at work, improved health and wellbeing.
Wiseman followed up after several months and the changes persisted. The formerly unlucky participants hadn’t just changed their attitude. They had changed their behavior, which changed their outcomes.
Applying This to Your Team
If you manage people, Wiseman’s framework gives you four specific levers to pull.
First, help your team broaden their attention. Encourage cross-functional conversations. Send people to conferences outside their domain. Create time for exploration that isn’t tied to immediate deliverables. The cost of context switching is real, but so is the cost of tunnel vision.
Second, create space for intuition. Not every decision needs a 30-slide deck. When experienced team members have a strong instinct, make room for that signal. The best managers know when to trust the data and when to trust the person.
Third, model positive expectations. Your team takes emotional cues from you. If you walk into a meeting expecting the worst, they’ll absorb that energy. If you walk in expecting to solve the problem, they’ll bring more creative effort to the table.
Fourth, normalize the reframe. When things go wrong — and they will — resist the impulse to assign blame. Instead, ask: what did we learn? What opportunity does this create? What’s the next move? This isn’t Pollyanna management. It’s the behavior pattern that Wiseman found, over a decade of research, in every single lucky person he studied.
Luck isn’t lightning. It doesn’t strike randomly from a clear sky. It’s a pattern of behaviors that increases your exposure to favorable outcomes. And if a psychologist in Hertfordshire can teach it in a month-long course, you can start building it today.
Your luck isn’t fixed. Your habits might be. Change the habits, and the luck follows.