Psychology of Luck: How To Become The Luckiest Human Alive

The luckiest people alive are not luckier than you. They don't have a better birth chart, a guardian angel, or some invisible magnet pulling good things toward them. And yet, year after year, the right job finds them. The right person sits down next to them, and the right door opens at exactly the moment they walk past it. Meanwhile, you

work just as hard, maybe harder, and the breaks keep landing on someone else. So, what is actually going on? How do some people seem to become the luckiest person alive, while others can't catch a single break? Most people answer that question in one of two ways. Some say, "Luck is a gift. Certain people are

simply born lucky, and the rest of us are not." Others say, "Luck isn't real at all. It's just an excuse, and if you want to make your own luck, all you need to do is grind harder." Both answers sound wise. Both are wrong. The psychology of luck tells a far stranger story. Luck is completely real. It is

genuinely random, and that is exactly why you can learn how to be lucky. In 2006, researchers Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts built an online music market and invited more than 14,000 people into it. Everyone was shown the same list of unknown songs from unknown bands. Some people listened completely blind. Others could see how many times each

song had already been downloaded, and those people were split into eight separate worlds. Same songs. Same starting point. If quality decided everything, the same hits should have risen to the top in every world. They didn't. The best songs rarely flopped, and the worst songs rarely took off, but everything in between was up for grabs.