How To Increase Your Luck

Posted on | May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’ve been reading the book, The Luck Factor, by Richard Wiseman. The 4 principles he teaches people on how to increase our luck is slightly different than the typical adage to what luck is. There is the adage that Luck is simply when Preparation meets Opportunity. I was thinking of how to best put this adage into a formula and came up with the following.

If you put this into a formula then it’s P + O= L .

Preparation is simply the idea of how ready you are. Opportunity is seen as chance or the prospect to advance.

For the sake of this formula, we can say that P reflects the intensity of your preparedness. Preparedness, is, afterall a spectrum or range rather than one finite point. You can be under prepared or over prepared or somewhere in between. O represents the number of opportunities you can have. Opportunities come more than once. Wiseman explains in the book as to how you can increase your opportunities. The combination of both of these element will than represent how “Lucky” you truly are.

So if you want to really increase your luck, then you need to increase your preparedness and/or increase the number of opportunities you have.

For example, the formula can be written as such; 3P+4O=L.

The numbers themselves are just arbitrary. They can be anything. The point is that you can increase your luck by simply increasing how well prepared and studious you are in addition to increasing your opportunities. By doing so, you increase your “luck factor”.

This conceptual formula can be applied to all aspects of your life, be it business, personal, or social. I think this formula in addition to Wiseman’s work really helps to demystify that luck isn’t as fatalistic as some people make it out to be. Ergo you’re either lucky or you’re not.

Let’s take a few scenarios:

Professional- You want a better job. Prepare better and more diligently for your interviews and increase the number of interviews you go on. Do this enough times and you can get really “lucky”.

Social- You want to increase the number of friends you have. Just go out more often rather than make the excuse that you may not meet anyone. This represents the opportunity element. You can increase your P by simply working on how sociable or friendly you are. People with good social skills tend to have a larger social network. Social skills can include how conversant you are, your accessibility, and overall personality. All of these can fit within the subset of P, being more prepared. By being prepared to be more social and increasing the opportunities of going out, you can increase how lucky you get in making new friends.

Romance- You want to get more dates. Again, you can increase your opportunities by simply going out and asking more women out. Someone is bound to say yes….sooner or later. Preparation in this case is simply working on your personality. This can be charm, wit, intelligence, or whatever traits that a woman may desire in you. By being better prepared and increasing the numbers, then you can get pretty “lucky”. I use that word loosely in this scenario.

Personal Example- I have recently gotten “luckier” in landing new clients in the past 2 months. I’m on a roll, actually. *Knock on wood*. I’ve closed every single deal that I’ve written a proposal for in the last several months. How? I changed a few things in my proposal writing. I changed the actual words, deleted a few areas, and made some modifications to how the proposal is presented to the prospect. I have not increased the number of prospects I meet. That would represent the O in this case. So by simply increasing how well prepared I am, I manifested a “lucky streak”.

Wiseman goes into far more detail of how to increase your luck factor in his book. When compared to his research, my formula is considered generic. However, don’t ignore the simplicity of it.

Some people may still argue what the definition of luck truly is and therefore making my formula invalid. The point isn’t to focus on the semantics but to understand that luck, which plays a role in our success, can be controlled to some degree. Luck, success…call it whatever you want. The point as Wiseman notes in his book, is that our lives aren’t as fatalistic as some of us would lead to believe.