Richard Wiseman did not set out to confirm what most people already suspected about luck. The leading psychologist spent a decade running one of the largest studies ever conducted on the science of luck, recruiting hundreds of volunteers aged 18 to 84 through newspaper and magazine ads, running personality questionnaires, intelligence tests, diaries, and laboratory experiments, and eventually building an experiment-based luck school to test whether luck could actually be taught. After just one month of training, participants reported a 40% increase in their self-reported luck index. Dr. Izzy Sealey, a Cambridge-trained doctor and tech co-founder, breaks down the four principles Wiseman identified and why, as she puts it, luck is not a fixed hand you have been dealt but a trainable skill and a muscle.
Before the habits, a distinction that changes everything
Sealey draws a firm line between chance and luck. Chance is the pure randomness of life: where you are born, the family you land in, the doors that happen to be open or closed on a given day. None of that is controllable, and she is direct about saying so. What Wiseman’s decade of research actually shows is that people can control what they do around chance to convert it into luck. That conversion rests on three levers: exposure (how much surface area you create for chance to go in your favor), preparedness (how ready you are to notice an opportunity when it appears), and response (whether you actually act on it).
The first principle is about creating, noticing, and acting on chance opportunities. Wiseman’s team ran a striking experiment: they gave volunteers a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside. Self-identified unlucky people spent roughly two minutes on the task. Lucky people finished in a few seconds, because they spotted the bold half-page message on page two that read: ‘Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.’ A second message, buried further in, offered $250 to anyone who told the experimenter they had seen it. Unlucky people missed both. The difference was not intelligence. It was openness. Unlucky people were so focused on the specific thing they were hunting that they filtered out everything else, including a windfall sitting in plain sight.
That openness extends to social life. One of Wiseman’s luckiest study participants described picking a color before every party and speaking only to people wearing that color, forcing himself beyond his usual circle. A large-scale 2022 LinkedIn study reinforced the principle, finding that many of the most life-changing opportunities arrive through weak ties: friends of friends, acquaintances sitting at the edges of a network rather than the center.
The habits that compound once you spot something
The second principle is trusting intuition. Wiseman’s luck school taught participants specific techniques to quiet the mind and sharpen intuitive signals. Sealey describes her own version: a morning meditation followed immediately by free-flow journaling, then acting on two or three things that surface. People who previously identified as unlucky reported being happier, more satisfied, and objectively luckier after just one month of these techniques.
The third principle involves the brain’s reticular activating system, the filter that decides what reaches conscious awareness. Lucky people expect good things to continue and that expectation quietly realigns what their brain elevates to notice. Sealey uses the example of buying a red Mini and suddenly seeing them on every street: the cars were always there, but the filter had not been primed to surface them.
The fourth principle, which Sealey flags as the most important of all, is bad luck transformation. Wiseman posed this to participants: you are in a bank during an armed robbery and a bullet hits your arm. Lucky people called it good fortune. Unlucky people called it bad fortune. Same event, opposite interpretation. Lucky people reframe potential misfortune and then take constructive steps to reduce future exposure to bad outcomes, which keeps the cycle of feeling and being lucky running.
The coin toss that became a marriage
Sealey’s own luck did not arrive in a straight line. Deciding which college to apply to within Cambridge, she was split between two options and settled it with a coin toss. The coin sent her to Emmanuel College, where she ended up studying medicine alongside her future husband, Ali. ‘If I went to Christ College instead,’ she notes, ‘we would have been way less likely to connect and actually get to know each other.’ The coin was chance. Everything that followed was luck.
Wiseman’s research ultimately asks people to stop waiting for fortune to arrive and start building the surface area it needs to land. Thousands of volunteers who considered themselves unlucky found, after one month, that they were not as stuck as they thought. The coin was always going to fall. They just had to be standing in the right part of the orchard when it did.
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