Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn | Hacker News Reader

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

telegraph.co.uk

199 pointsFlemlord71 comments

I saw a TV version of this article quite a while ago, and like JacobAldridge I have used it a number of times in conversations about luck.

It certainly makes sense to me. You make your own luck by being more aware of things going on around you, so that you can spot opportunities that others might miss. Observing my own life, I feel that a lot of my "luck" has come from an ability to leap onto opportunities that others might have hesitated about for months - this despite the fact that I have a natural tendency to delay and be extremely conservative.

So my view is, if I can overcome this risk-averseness and take on opportunities that I'd normally be scared of, surely others can too. It's extremely hard to convince self-styled unlucky people of this, though. Perhaps I'm just bad at persuading them.

This reminds me of a recent study in bird personalities. It turns out there are very big differences from bird to bird in terms of curiosity and risk taking and other things.

And there is a huge body of scientific work about bird behavior EXCEPT that now it turns out the birds studied, trapped, tagged, etc, would have been a self selecting group of atypical super curious risk takers.

And all of this science is now suspected to be skewed.

And the fact that there are BOTH lucky and unlucky birds and people tells us that there's more than one way to optimize fitness.

Curiosity, optimism, luck work some times, and other times get you killed.

Now in the modern industrialized world, you're probably better of being open and optimistic and all the rest. But then again we've had an unprecedented multi-decade period of peace stability and economic growth.

If we are heading into a new great depression this might change.

Or imagine you're in some kind of accident or disaster, perhaps a building fire, and being a pessimist and super focused you bail at the first hint of smoke and single mindedly make it down the stairs as fast as possible and you're out and alive. Still a worried unlucky pessimist but alive. The lucky optimist on the other hand might have tried the elevator, when the heat expended both the elevator and the shaft, it got stuck, and the lucky optimists got cooked.

Just saying.

I think in your search for a contrary example, you're looking at it in the wrong way. The focus of the unlucky pessimist will lead them unerringly to the stairs, whether or not that's the best option. The lucky optimist won't foolishly do what no one should ever do, but instead notice that the open elevator shaft has a ladder that someone else just safely used to escape. Being lucky doesn't mean you have to be stupid.

The unlucky pessimist will stand in line while the lucky optimist will notice that what she needs is easily obtained out of the line.

Take this thought experiment to its extreme and the unlucky should have gone extinct. The fact that both lucky and unlucky personality types persist, suggest both have advantages.

Unlucky people tend to be more focused on whatever they happen to be doing because they're worried about making a mistake. But there's quite a bit of evidence that this sort of conscious, focused thought uses up so many mental resources that it can actually become a hindrance. Professional athletes perform significantly worse when they actively contemplate their behavior, and focusing on something prevents the mindwandering that's necessary for creative, insightful solutions. Your subconscious is a HUGE part of your brain, but focusing too hard on something makes it harder to use it.

Henceforth... "icing the kicker"

Agree entirely. Just today I was staring at some code that I intuitively knew could be rearchitected to be simpler, more maintainable, etc., but I couldn't put my finger on just how to do it. So I'd stare at it for half an hour, and then take a break, repeat throughout the day. Now I'm pretty sure exactly what I need to do, and I think it's entirely because I took my attention away from it every so often.

I've always thought of myself as being very lucky. When I was younger, I attributed this to the fact that my parents were Christians and that 'God was watching over us.' But in truth, my mind seems overwhelmingly to ignore the bad and remember the good. This is partly due to my narcissism. I'm special!

Now as an atheist, I've come to accept and indeed appreciate the role of pure, random chance in our lives. What happens to is is not determined solely by us, but but rather by our response to our situations, over which we have not control.

Thought experiment: Let's say that there is someone with whom you would be a perfect romantic match-your values align, etc. But let's say that on the day you meet them, they happened not to eat breakfast. They were so hungry, that just a minute before you saw them, they had to eat a biscuit, leaving residue in their teeth. "Ewww!", you say, in ignorance.

Thing like this happen Every.Single.Day. There are probably thousands of Einsteins who will die in poverty and obscurity. That's life. Failure to realize this is part of what causes Fundamental Attribution Error.

I think the main thing to realize regarding the Fundamental Attribution Error is that when committing the error you are judging others and yourself on differing criteria.

For example, if you, when experiencing 'bad luck', tend to recognize its source as your environment rather than qualities of your person, it would be because of the Fundamental Attribution Error that you would incorrectly assume that the same 'bad luck' experienced by someone else is because of some qualities of that person rather than their environment. In many cases, especially with regard to 'good luck' it's just the opposite: For yourself you see the 'good-luck' as coming from YOU, for others you see the 'good-luck' as coming from their environment.

It's been helpful for me to remember these things especially when someone ticks me off or whatever... It's incorrect to assume that my neighbor being a douche is because deep down he is a douche-bag, rather than because of his crappy morning that I know nothing about. I would want to be given the same courtesy.

I remember this article from when it first came out - in 2003 - and have used the newspaper / picture story as an example countless times.

If you don't believe you create the reality you experience, think again. Blaming external factors, like luck, just absolves us of our own responsibility to ourselves.

Dammit, where's Eliezer Yudkowsky when you need him. I'm pretty sure he'll have an interesting take on this.

BEHOLD, I AM HERE!

MBlume posted the article to LW here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1b9/do_the_unlucky_systematically_un...

If you want me to say something stunningly intelligent about it, um... ah... okay, how about this:

Since we know at the start of the problem that luck in the supernatural sense doesn't really exist, we would expect people experiencing systematic exogenous runs of genuine good or bad luck to be rare in the population. But people who claim to be lucky or unlucky are much more common than that.

The next question you'd have to address is whether the people who claim to be "lucky" or "unlucky" actually seem to be experiencing more-than-chance proportions of good or bad life events, of a sort we would otherwise think of as exogenous (like falling down stairs) or partially randomness-based (like meeting a new girlfriend in a crowd). There would be a large problem of biased reporting at this point.

If so, then because we know luck doesn't really exist, we should indeed look for hidden internal characteristics to explain these runs of good or bad luck. As the saying goes, "YOU are the only common denominator in all your failed relationships."

Trying to train people to be lucky was an interesting attempt at experimental manipulation, but it's hard to untangle from the "biased reporting" hypothesis - you may just be making people think they're lucky. Still a good thing to test, though. (Possible stronger test: Train people to be "lucky in love" (that's what you tell them you're doing) and see if they become luckier in other areas too.)

If the data is valid, I think the article establishes rather well that people who call themselves "lucky" are indeed measurably different from people who call themselves "unlucky." The latter group blew the photo-counting test, for instance.

It is at that point where I would inject your perspective. What other measurable differences are there? Are "lucky" people wealthier? Healthier? Laid more? Etc.

Then there's the matter of training people for greater "luck." I agree, the article is sketchy here, and I'm not sure of a reliable way to measure an increase in "luck" (unless we assume that the "unlucky" can be expected to flunk the photo count indefinitely).

In essence, I think the article is 1/3 of the way there. True, "lucky" people differ from "unlucky" people. So let's figure out if they differ in ways that we care about, and if we can make "unlucky" people become "lucky." Then we'll have something.

Why say that "luckiness doesn't really exist"? I expected you to say something like, luckiness is just the term that people have always used as a catch-all to sum up all the things that matter, but they lack the ability to describe in any further detail.

He has convolved luck with happiness.

If someone believes he is happy, he is happy.

If someone believes he is the lucky, he is not necessarily lucky.

Seeing the world rose colored glasses does not make you any luckier, it makes you happier. By only asking for those that self-identified as lucky or unlucky, he has failed to isolate the variable of happiness.

Here is an excerpt from the book which points out the author's faulty reasoning.

"On average both `lucky' and `unlucky' participants lost about £2.50. Wiseman's conclusion: `The results indicated that luck wasn't due to psychic ability'."

In this quote it is revealed that the people who "felt" lucky really weren't lucky. In fact, they were about as lucky as the people who felt unlucky. The people who were "lucky" also expected to win twice as much as people who felt "unlucky". So his whole experiment is flawed.

This is the type of optimism hawked by many self-help gurus. But then again, it doesn't really matter if your situation really has improved with these "tips" as the Romans found out with church and bread and circuses. Keep the plebs amused and fearful and they will willfully ignore everything else.

I disagree; I think he is just using a slightly different definition of luck than you are. Luck is not simply a matter of "defying the odds" or getting the better end of coinflips more often. It's also about opportunities. I think the article did a nice job of examining how "lucky" people are often more fortunate largely because they give themselves more chances to be lucky.

The point about perception of luck being self-perpetuating is good as well. If you view yourself as unlucky, you will tend to be more timid in situations where you might need a little luck to succeed, while a lucky individual will be willing to take more chances.

This dynamic is very visible in poker... After a run of bad luck, it's very easy to miss an opportunity to do something like play a drawing hand aggressively to make a player fold (I don't want to get the money in and lose, again!), instead taking a more passive, less successful route (I'll call the flop... of course, I missed again and don't have odds to continue, now I have to fold.).

Again, being willing to take risks for greater gain doesn't make you luckier.

In the case of poker, it might be smarter to pretend to play aggressively after a losing streak, but at this point, you are using reverse psychology and you are playing smarter, NOT luckier.

Ever heard of the overaggressive guy that failed a business or died in a stunt? No, of course not. You only hear the success stories which make it seem like the answer to life is aggressiveness.

Re-read the article. The people who considered themselves "lucky" turned out to be more observant, and therefore would encounter unexpected opportunities. The people who considered themselves "unlucky" would miss glaring opportunities that should have been staring them in the face. If opportunities keep on dropping in your lap but not in others, after a while you're likely to feel lucky. If opportunities keep on not dropping in your lap while they do in others, after a while you're likely to feel unlucky. Objectively you just don't understand the source of your consistent fortune. But that is how it will feel.

It isn't about risks or risk-taking at all. It is about better observation leading to noticing and taking advantage of opportunities. What is the risk in being given an offer to easily make 250 British pounds? The unlucky people didn't even see it! (The lucky people presumably would have noticed that, but didn't because they noticed that the second page gave them the answer they were looking for so they didn't read the rest of the paper.)

He then figured out some of the factors that lead to the improved observation rate, and found that he could teach "luckiness" as a skill. Of course you aren't going to actually be lucky if you learn that skill. But if you have it you'll have more opportunities to take advantage of. And that's pretty worthwhile.

That is easily an artifact of verification bias.

There was no effort in trying to introduce events that would be negative if aggressively pursued such as a Nigerian 411 or lottery scam. You certainly aren't lucky if you noticed one of these and decided it was a nice opportunity.

The perception is definitely verification bias. However there was an effort to train "unlucky" people to be more "lucky", and there was evidence that this really improved their lives. So while there are cases that it will cause them to fall for scams, on the whole it seems to be a good change.

The "training" wasn't actually luck, it was a training of attitude.

Sure it may have improved their lives, but attributing this to luck is as much of a mistake as saying that learning to prospect for gold is increasing my luck at getting rich.

You conflate two separate things there – 'noticing' and 'deciding it was a nice opportunity'.

The article claimed that noticing opportunities was a characteristic of lucky people. It did not say that lucky people were any more likely to be more risk-taking or credulous than other people.

> The article claimed that noticing opportunities was a characteristic of lucky people. It did not say that lucky people were any more likely to be more risk-taking or credulous than other people.

No I did not conflate them. The author only presented "good" opportunities, so it is obvious that the people who noticed them would always benefit from being more observant of things they deem good.

In fact this attitude made them more expectant that good things happen to them, as evidenced by the lottery test where they expected to win twice as much as the people who were "unlucky".

If you naturally expect to benefit more from any such activity, isn't this naturally more risk-taking and credulous?

The article was saying that luck was down to mindset, not psychic ability!

Richard Wiseman's claims are in no way affected by the experiment you just mentioned, because games of pure chance are not affected by mindset. Most of life is affected by mindset.

Again you and the author are twisting the definition of luck.

I will use this example again. If I learn how to prospect for gold, does this count as increasing my luck since chances are higher that I will be able to find gold? The answer is a resounding no.

Getting a better life from a positive mindset cannot be attributed to luck anymore than learning any other skill (say a MD) is making me any luckier.

Twisting your definition of luck? Obviously the "lucky" people in the experiment considered themselves lucky based on a different metric than yours. The "unlucky" people seemed to be using a similar metric. This experiment addressed that metric. So what's the problem?

I will use this example again. If I learn how to prospect for gold, does this count as increasing my luck since chances are higher that I will be able to find gold?

How did you learn to prospect for gold? How did you decide where to prospect? If you're "lucky", you saw someone at the bar buy a round of shots because of a nice day prospecting, you struck up a conversation with him, became acquaintances, and joined him on his next prospecting trip. If you're "unlucky", you thought, Man, that guy's so lucky. Everyone's luckier than me, as you took the shot and ordered another beer.

The "unlucky" people seemed to be using a similar metric. This experiment addressed that metric. So what's the problem?

Like I said before, just because you think you are lucky does not mean you are lucky. Just as thinking that you are smart does not mean you are smart.

If you're "lucky", you saw someone at the bar buy a round of shots because of a nice day prospecting, you struck up a conversation with him, became acquaintances, and joined him on his next prospecting trip. If you're "unlucky", you thought, Man, that guy's so lucky. Everyone's luckier than me, as you took the shot and ordered another beer.

That isn't called luck. That is called being optimistic.

Consider this scenario: "Lucky" person A notices a Nigerian 411 scam, and decides to do it, not knowing it was a scam, while "unlucky" person B does not know that those are scams as well, but did not notice it anyway because "unlucky" people are less perceptive.

Who is truly the lucky one now? The "unlucky" person is, because not only did he not waste his time on that "opportunity", but the chance that he does not lose any money is much higher than the "lucky" chump who likes to believe that everything is a gift from the heavens just for him.

Tunnel vision is caused by stress. It also represents the worldview that all-you-see is all-there-is. It's a kind of solipsism. What makes what you see so significant? Literally, it is true that you can only observe from your point of view; and that you are always at the center of your horizons. So it's an understandable mistake to make.

But to appreciate the unknown requires humility - it's not just that you don't know the answers, but that you do not know the question; cannot even conceive of the question. It's a door being unlocked, where you didn't even know there was a doorway.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It's not that the teacher arrives, but that we are surrounded by teachers at all times, and we can only see them when we are ready. That's when they appear.

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

This may be tangential to the discussion at hand, but for many, like myself, who tend to be shy and hesitant to reach out to others, this seems like one good way to overcome that. If you make it into a game, it can become less stressful. Anyone else have any other ideas like this?

[Edit - Formatting]

Do what I did to make it happen---just do it. Do it everyday. Talk to random strangers. Go live in a hostel in a foreign country (by far the easiest way ever to meet people). Make it natural

Agreed on hostels being the easiest way to meet people. You don't even need to try, which is why it actually might not improve your skills at home all that much.

Organize a Rubik's party - great fun - everyone comes with clothes of different colors. The goal is to exchange clothes with someone else so that at the end of the evening, all your clothes have the same color. First to do it "wins".

Great way to meet people - you have to talk to them to do it. Great way to meet girls too. More of a young/student thing though - replaces beer pong around here. Would not work with an older crowd I guess, but hey, as long as you do it with the outer clothing, everyone could play.

Parcel this up as a message about making your own luck or being determined, taking advantage of opportunities or consciously priming your selection bias in your favour, and some kinds of people are all over it.

Parcel up the same message as positive thinking, cosmic ordering, the law of attraction or subjective reality, and the same types trip over themselves to be the first to ridicule it.

And it does seem to be the same core message.

Yeah? Let's train people in the law of attraction and compare them to people trained to be non-supernaturally lucky, and see who gets luckier.

Given that the supernatural doesn't exist, if the training teaches a similarly useful change in behaviour, they should get a similar increase in luck as defined by Prof. Wiseman in the article.

Arriving at a conclusion via fallacious reasoning ought to be discouraged, no matter the truth value of that conclusion. If I ask you what 2+2 is, and you roll a die and it happens to show four dots, I'm not going to praise your arithmetic skills.

Makes perfect sense. Knowing why is often as important (if not more important) than knowing what. That way you can avoid blaming the Holocaust on the Jews' bad attitudes.

  >  'For fun, I placed a second large message
  >  halfway through the newspaper: "Stop
  >  counting. Tell the experimenter you have
  >  seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky
  >  people missed the opportunity because they
  >  were still too busy...

Uh huh. Was this 'study' financed to the tune of thousands of pounds? Or were the offers rescinded from all those light-hearted, open-minded, happy, lucky people who are good and deserving in every way, especially when compared to bad, sick-hearted unlucky people who probably molest their pets and deserve to be poor because they're actually inferior in deep spiritual ways when you think about it, especially when you think about the matter 'scientifically', with like, stats and everything?

Or, was the offer of £250 not actually ever made?

The article reaks of a kind of manufacturable 'luck' that it nevertheless did not mention.

For an alternate (and more rigorous) view on the feedback between positive outlook and positive experience, see Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism.

In it, he describes a number of experiments to show that how optimistic we are depends on how we choose to interpret past events. He also shows that increased optimism has measurable positive effects in many occupations and that a person's seemingly inherent level of optimism can usually be changed through a set of behavioral exercises. (However, he also points out that optimism can be a detriment in some circumstances.)

The world is what you make of it.

If you ever want an interesting look into the psyche of a person / have them reveal themselves, ask them to describe to you situations in which they were 'lucky' (from a book "On Flirting")

I am thinking of the words opters and non-opters to describe such people. Lucky/unlucky would mean they have better odds at games with random elements such as roulette, or better chance of walking over money on the street or so on.

[Edit] As jodrellblank replied that would mean a person for which the laws of probability/statistics do not apply. [/Edit]

opter - n. A person(or agent) who is good at seeking opportunities and is able to take advantage of them.

Lucky/unlucky would mean they have better odds at games with random elements such as roulette

If you define 'lucky' as someone for whom physics/statistics do not apply then you make it a pretty meaningless term for the real world.

or better chance of finding money on the street or so on.

This is what the article is talking about - the chance of money being on the street stays the same, the 'lucky' person is more likely to spot it.

...chance of finding money on the street or so on...

Sorry, I was not clear. I meant that the there will be money in the street. Not that they will find them. I will edit my post.

luck, by its meaning of definition, cannot be determined or manupilated.You can either define the situation as your luck or your willingness, it just depends on how you see the context. Luck, fate and willingness.How all those are related to each other is best examined in the Kieslowski's movie Blind Chance.

I was just thinking about this issue today because the house that i wanted to rent was just rented to someone else. It was depressing & important for several reasons. I keep asking myself: "what if i called the broker earlier, just a day before? Could i have the chance to rent the house?" Well, i might be act earlier but i didn't know about the house earlier, the reason that i didn't know, well i had to do something that day..and this goes and goes and goes...Its like the Feyman video that i watched from here, some very simple things can branches into very complicated and sophisticated manners. This also partly mentioned in the funeral monologue from Synecdoche, NY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9PzSNy3xj0

Yes, but if you take that attitude too far you'll never learn from your mistakes. It's quite possible that if you had stopped procrastinating and called earlier, you really would have had the chance the rent the house.

Don't take luck personally; there isn't enough luck out there for everyone to be as lucky as Bill Gates.

There are a lot of things out there that guarantee success. Low risk, and time consuming. Most people are too scared of high risk endeavors to attempt anything high risk more than a few times in their entire lives.

I am someone who seems to often have phenomenal "good luck". My subjective experience is that it also relates to how you treat other people. Just being consistently polite and having good boundaries opens up opportunities in a big way -- often to a degree that astonishes me.

I do all of this, and my personal life has had lots of good luck in the last five years, but at the utter expense of my professional luck. I have had an astounding series of bad luck, especially recently. I do all the things you mention, the article mentions, etc. And still, it seems as if my luck as gone from bad to worse. It's shocking to me. Certainly a large part of this is my fault; I had too much hubris and self-confidence, and was sure if things had been going a certain way, they would continue that way even to some extent. But bad luck happens, just as good luck happens, with no priming for the condition at all.

It's not like my life is ALL cherries and no pits. But because of the personal challenges I have had, I simply couldn't make it if I didn't have some serious "saving graces" going on.

Well, lucky people could just be more naturally observant. It seems that would be a useful trait.

This is more about anxiety than luck. It seems the 'unlucky' volunteers had a higher level of anxiety and thus a decreased ability to detect opportunities.

Anxiety and stress can interfere in many activities.

Totally true. Anxiety saps all kinds of brain power.

I'm not so sure. I've found a certain level of anxiety can make me perform better at things. Complacency can be dangerous too in my experience.

True but anxiety tends to narrow focus and depending on what you are trying to accomplish it can either help or hurt.

Perhaps also more trusting/optimistic.

Ie, for the newspaper experiment, the message said there were 43 pictures but why should you trust it?

True, I would still count them after ssing the message

Didn't the Pierson's Puppeteers breed for luck? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers#Foreign_...

The moral is that luck is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just a mindset.

This article highlights a reason that 12-hour work days could be a bad idea for startups. Perhaps you'll be working so hard on your Odeo that you won't get "lucky" and find your Twitter.

I wish I could know how the luckies and unluckies would have done on the "marshmallow test" as 4-year-olds.

(Then I'd make the "luckies" be guards and the "unluckies" be prisoners...)

I think the unluckies would resist the marshmallows better. The hight degree of worry strikes me as mind over emotion. Then again the variables might be independent and there would be no correlation between EQ and luck.

The moral of the story is to not be so tightly procedural in your tasks as to miss opportunities when they naturally arise.

Those that get lucky more often identify more opportunities to get lucky from.

Surely there are anxious people that have won the lottery?

1) Be more adventurous 2) Don't be afraid to fail 3) Relax 4) Think out of the box 5) Think Positive

Yay! I was right there's nothing called luck.

I read an article about this once. Here's the gist of it: if you want to be lucky, you should gamble, etc. only when the entropy levels are higher than usual.

What? No. Maybe you should read this article. Perhaps you can interchange "Luck" with "Fortune", but it contains a few principles that could benefit you in the future.

I'm sorry, I meant "lower", not "higher" (less chaos).

Anybody else annoyed by what a blatant advertisement this is for a self-help program?

"My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. ... After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident. ... The Luck Factor (Century), is available for £9.99 + £1.99 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222."

To me the news here is, "Publishing company uses newspaper it owns to promote one of its books."

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