Can You Learn to be Lucky? summary

A social psychologist named Robert Zajonc once ran an experiment in which he exposed Westerners to foreign characters – Chinese logograms, for example – and then asked them how much they liked each character. Overall, the participants favored those characters that they had seen most frequently.

This experiment is a demonstration of the exposure effect, which predicts that people will like things they’re familiar with. This effect has an obvious evolutionary explanation. As Zajonc put it, “If it’s familiar, it hasn’t eaten you yet.”

Most of us can think of people we know who are beautiful and seem to find success with ease. We all have that good-looking friend who was the college quarterback, always got the girls and is now raking in millions at Goldman Sachs. Beautiful people simply seem to have all the luck.

And, in truth, beautiful people do have a lot of luck because humans are predisposed to favor attractive people.

If you have the confidence to get up and talk to that cute guy across the bar, you’ll be more likely to get lucky than if you sit in the corner, nursing your mojito.

Confidence is about focusing more on reward than risk. Now, our brain has both an activation system, which encourages us to do things based on potential reward, and an inhibition system, which uses stress and anxiety to stop us from doing things based on potential risk. When we shift from activation to inhibition, we go from “go and talk to him – you might get a date out of it!” to “you’ll only embarrass yourself – it’s time to accept that you’ll die alone.”  

A Swedish psychologist named Karl Anders Ericsson once found that the world’s best musicians had, on average, practiced for 10,000 hours. This has led to a rather simplistic idea that’s been popularized by the writer Malcolm Gladwell – that you can become an expert in any field by practicing for 10,000 hours or more.

It’s a seductive theory. You, too, could have been a world-class performer, if you’d only stuck with those oboe lessons instead of drinking Pinot Grigio with your friends! But it’s not really true. Hard work and practice aren’t enough. You also need the right genes.

How do you spend your downtime? Working tirelessly on a side project that, someday, may lead to major success? Or watching Netflix in your sweatpants?

Self-control, and investing time and effort in activities that are only rewarding in the long-term, is a great way to generate successful, apparently lucky outcomes.

Who you know is more important than what you know. Yes, it’s a cliché but for a good reason as it contains an element of truth. You may be the best in the world at what you do, but if you don’t make the right social connections, you won’t get any lucky breaks.

In 1989, sociologist Katherine Giuffre tried to get an idea of how social connections affected success by examining the people and relationships within the New York fine art photography scene.

Tony Hsieh’s first business failure came when he was nine years old. His business plan was simple. Acquire a box of worms. Let them reproduce. Sell the new worms for a profit.

Sadly, his due diligence didn’t identify a risk: all the worms might escape, along with any prospect of profit (this happened). But Hsieh wasn’t deterred from an entrepreneurial life. He was relentlessly curious and loved to explore new opportunities. He started a newsletter as a child and sold advertising space. At Harvard, he learned about bartending and – less conventionally – how to milk cows. He turned a profit by buying McDonald’s burgers for $1 and reselling them in dorms for $3.