How to get luckier

The psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years studying people who described themselves as unusually lucky or unlucky. In one test, described in his 2003 article The luck factor, he handed them a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside. The unlucky people took about two minutes on average. The lucky people took seconds, because the second page carried a half-page message, in type more than two inches high, saying the paper held 43 photographs. Lucky people tended to see it. Unlucky people tended to keep counting.

Wiseman published this in a magazine article and a popular book, and it was never peer reviewed, so it is an illustration. It still points at something real. Much of what we call luck was visible to everyone and acted on by a few.

A more useful map comes from the neurologist James Austin, whose 1978 book Chase, Chance, and Creativity sorted luck into four kinds. Marc Andreessen summarized it in 2007, and Naval Ravikant built on it in How to Get Rich.

Blind luck

Blind luck is the winning lottery ticket. Nothing you do changes the odds, which is why Naval sets it aside. “In 1,000 parallel universes,” he says, “you want to be wealthy in 999 of them.” The other three kinds respond to how you spend your time.

Luck from motion

Austin tied the second kind to the inventor Charles Kettering, who said, “Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.”

Richard Hamming saw a version of this at Bell Labs, which he described in You and Your Research. Scientists who worked with their office doors closed got more done today and tomorrow. Ten years later, he said, they somehow no longer knew quite which problems were worth working on. Those who worked with the door open were interrupted constantly, and they also picked up clues about what might be important. Hamming admitted he could not prove cause and effect. He still saw “a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things.”

Motion pays most when it reaches people outside your usual circle. In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter argued in The strength of weak ties that acquaintances matter because they reach circles your close friends do not. Close friends tend to know the same people and hear the same news. In 2022 a team of researchers working with LinkedIn tested the idea directly. Over five years, they randomly changed which connections LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature recommended to more than 20 million users. Moderately weak ties, measured by how many mutual connections two people had, led to the most job moves. The very weakest ties helped less.

Luck from a prepared mind

The third kind is the one Louis Pasteur meant when he said that in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.

In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that a mould contaminating one of his culture plates had killed the staphylococcus colonies around it, which he described in his 1929 paper. A contaminated plate is usually thrown away. Fleming had spent years studying substances that kill bacteria, and in 1922 he had described one of them, lysozyme, found in tears and mucus. He recognized what the mould was doing because he had seen something like it before.

Preparation also widens what you can recognize from other fields. Biology has borrowed again and again from statistics and computer science, usually because someone knew both well enough to see the fit. Depth in one field is what makes a stray idea from another field usable.

Luck that finds you

The fourth kind is the strangest. Austin attached it to Benjamin Disraeli’s line, “We make our fortunes and we call them fate.”

Naval’s example is a diver known for attempting dives nobody else will try. When someone else finds a sunken treasure ship they cannot reach, their blind luck becomes the diver’s luck, because the diver is the person they call.

A real case comes from the University of Pennsylvania. Katalin Karikó had already spent years working on messenger RNA when, in the late 1990s, she met the immunologist Drew Weissman at a photocopier, where both were copying journal articles. They began working together, and their mRNA research later earned them the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The meeting was chance. It mattered because she had become one of the few people who knew how to work with mRNA.

Naval’s broader point is that the internet lets a niche obsession find its audience, and that “no one can compete with you on being you.” Writing in public works this way. You write about an idea, and a reader who has been working on something similar finds you. Reputation compounds the same way. Naval’s phrase is to “play long-term games with long-term people,” because returns in relationships, as in money and learning, come from compounding.

Blind luck will always play a part. The other three kinds respond to how you spend your time and what you become known for, which is why the same people seem to get lucky again and again.

Luck favors people who are easy to find and quick to notice.

Further reading

• Marc Andreessen, Luck and the entrepreneur: the four kinds of luck (2007), a summary of James Austin’s four kinds of luck.
• Naval Ravikant, How to Get Rich (without getting lucky), on luck that finds you and long-term games.
• Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (1986), on open doors and important problems.
• Rajkumar et al., A causal test of the strength of weak ties (Science, 2022), the LinkedIn experiment.
• Richard Wiseman, The luck factor (Skeptical Inquirer, 2003), the newspaper test.