5 TINY HABITS THAT MAKE YOU INSTANTLY LUCKIER (backed by psychology)

You probably know someone who gets lucky all of the time. They get exciting job opportunities, they randomly meet cool people, and they always appear in the right place at the right time. Well, their luck is not random. It is actually a trainable skill that has been well researched in psychology, which means that you can become lucky too. My name is Olga, I study computation and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, and in this video I'll break A British psychologist Richard Wiseman spent 10 years studying the self-described lucky and unlucky people. He gave them personality tests, he tracked their lives, he tried to figure out what they did differently, and he found out that lucky people consistently do four very specific behaviors. Then Wiseman built an actual school where he taught these four behaviors to the people who had been unlucky their whole lives. And after just one month of the school, they reported huge life changes. They reported that they got better opportunities, that they met better people, and they generally felt happier and luckier in their lives. So when I tell you that luck is a trainable skill, I'm being 100% serious. But just one quick disclaimer, there's a big difference between fortune and luck. So fortune is the things that you don't have any control over, it's the things that happen to you. It's what city you were born in, what country, what family you were born into, the timing of the events that you don't have any control over. But luck is what you proactively do in response to fortune. So fortune is the things that happen to you, luck is what you do about it. So now let's discuss the behaviors lucky people share. The first behavior of lucky people is that they actively notice what is in their environment. While the rest of us is walking through life on autopilot, lucky people constantly scan the environment and constantly notice the small opportunities, the small openings in their environment that everyone else would walk past. Imagine two women at the same coffee shop the same morning. The first woman walks into the coffee shop with her headphones in, not paying attention, looking down, just ordering and quickly getting her coffee and eating. The second woman comes into the same coffee shop and she notices that the stranger in line next to her is reading a book that she's been really wanting to read. So she asks them about it. Then this conversation turns into a coffee, then this coffee turns into a friendship, and then that causes her to get a job referral from that person six months later. That woman got lucky primarily because of her proactive behavior. She got lucky because she opened herself to the world and she noticed a small opportunity for a conversation with a stranger. And here's how Wiseman proved that lucky people genuinely notice more than unlucky people. So he brought the self-described lucky and unlucky people to the lab and he gave them the same newspaper. And the task for them was to count how many photographs were in the newspaper. Unlucky people spent an average of two minutes for the task to count all the photographs. But lucky people did it in seconds. Why? How did they do it in seconds? Because on the second page of the newspaper there was a huge message that was saying stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper. And then a few pages later there was another huge message that said stop counting. Tell the experimenter you saw this big message and you get 250 pounds as a reward. The lucky people saw both messages immediately. But the unlucky people they didn't notice them and they just kept on counting even though there was a huge message that was saying that you should stop counting. Here's the number. Lucky people are constantly scanning for opportunities. And the good thing is that you can also train your brain to do the exact same thing using the practice called relax diary. So every night before going to sleep you write down a few good things that happened to you that day. For example coffee was really good, a stranger smiled at you, or a stranger started a conversation with you, or your friend recommended the movie and you watched that movie and you really liked it. It can be very small and you don't necessarily have to feel grateful about these things. You just have to write them down. And I know you're thinking like uh it's journaling, gratitude journaling, I've heard this before, it's so boring. But this is not just journaling. This is basically the process of reprogramming your brain. Your brain decides what to pay attention to based on what it thinks matters to you. So when you write down good things every night you're basically telling your brain that this is what I want you to track, this is what I want you to try to find in our environment. Which means that you start noticing more positive opportunities that you used to walk past. The second behavior of lucky people is that they have wider networks. And I do not mean that they have more close friends, I mean that they're loosely connected to more people than an average person. In 1973 a sociologist Mark Brennevetter, he studied how people actually find jobs and he expected the answer to be obvious. He thought that most of the people find jobs through their close friends, through their families, through people who they know best. But actually 80 percent, more than 80 percent of people find jobs through someone that they barely know. Like a friend of a friend or an old co-worker or someone that they met at a party randomly three years ago. Brennevetter called these people weak ties. And the reason that happens is because your close friends, your close family members, they usually have access to the same opportunities that you have because they live in the same world. But your weak ties, they often tend to live in a different place, they might work in a different industry and they essentially become this bridge to the opportunities that did not yet exist in your current life. I know this is a very old study and you might think that it's not relevant anymore but this study has been replicated so many times. And the last time they replicated it was actually in this massive replication in 2022. Which still proves that this is true. We find most jobs through weak ties. We find most opportunities through our weak ties. And there's a really cool story that I love about this from Stanford professor Tina Selig who has a PhD in neuroscience. She wrote 18 books, she's very successful. So years ago she was going on an early morning flight to Ecuador and she sat down, she was about to close her eyes, put on her headphones and go to sleep. But then something changed and she decided to say hello to a stranger that was sitting next to her. So she started a conversation. And that conversation, after a chain of long follow-ups over the next few years, it led her to sign a really great book deal that then became a bestseller. Most people would say that she simply got lucky but what she did was proactive behavior. She said hello to a stranger who she totally could have ignored. And then it brought her a huge opportunity years later. So here's a practice for you. It's called the weak tie outreach. So once a week you message one person that you haven't spoken to in months. You message them, you ask them how they're doing, maybe you need a coffee or they live far away, just have a call and see what they're doing and how they are. And if you do it once a week for a whole year, you're going to have 52 people that you've reconnected with. And maybe it's going to bring you an exciting friendship or maybe it's going to bring you some exciting opportunity down the line. You cannot engineer good fortune but you can engineer the conditions where good fortune has a chance to find you. The third behavior is that lucky people regularly trust their gut. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and you immediately feel like that person's worth talking to, they look cool. Or you overhear some opportunity and you immediately are curious and you want to like ask about it. That is basically your gut instinct. And in Wiseman's research, 90% of lucky people say that they regularly trust their gut. Well I know that you're thinking like gut instincts, intuition, that sounds like such a woo-woo, that sounds like magic, I don't believe this. But there's real science behind it. Your unconscious brain processes way more information than your conscious mind ever sees. So every time you walk into a room or you have a conversation with someone, your brain essentially logs this as patterns. So when something feels right or something feels off, your unconscious is recognizing a pattern and it's feeling this way. The problem is most of us override our gut instincts with overthinking. So imagine you're at a party and you see this cool person and you really want to talk to them because there's something cool about them. But then you start overthinking it and trying to rationalize why do I even have to talk to that person. So by the time you're done deliberating, that person might be gone. So here's a practice for you to learn how to trust your gut instincts again. It's called the 60 second rule. So the next time you have a strong gut signal to do something, obviously under healthy limits please, just give yourself 60 seconds to do it. Just send that message, talk to that person, talk to that stranger, whatever the signal is telling you to do, just do it inside one minute. Because lucky people do not overthink their gut reactions, they act on them. Behavior four is that lucky people walk through the world expecting that things will work out. Because your expectations change your behavior and your behavior changes your reality. In 1968, the Harvard psychologists ran a classic Pygmalion experiment. So they told elementary school teachers that certain students in their class are going to be late bloomers based on some fake test that they administered. The students were actually chosen randomly, but by the end of the year, those kids who were labeled as late bloomers, they were measurably outperforming their peers. Because the teachers who were expecting those kids to succeed, they were giving them more challenging work, they were giving them more attention, more encouragement. The expectation changed the behavior and the behavior changed the outcome. And it works on yourself too. If you walk into a conversation and you expect it to go well, you make more eye contact, you take more conversational risks, and you generally feel more confident. Lucky people have spent years building a default expectation that things will work out. And this becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. So here's a practice for you. It's called the optimistic walk-in. For the next week, before you walk into any situation, a date, an interview, a party, just try to assume that it's going to go well. Just try to think about the expectation that you're carrying into the situation. And if it's pessimistic, try to swap it for the optimistic one. And there's also the fifth behavior that I want to add as a bonus. And it's that when bad things happen, lucky people are more resilient and they bounce back fast and faster than unlucky people. In one of Wiseman's studies, a man in his lucky group came in for a meeting with his leg in a cast and Wiseman told him, I bet you don't consider yourself that lucky now because you broke your leg. And the man replied, last time I had to go to a hospital, I met a nurse there and I fell in love with her and now we've been married for 25 years. So it's not believable this bad luck because you never know what's going to happen. When something bad happens, unlucky people always imagine how things could have been better. If only I didn't go jumping on trampolines, I wouldn't have broken my arm, I would have been healthy now. Lucky people do the opposite. They imagine how things could have been worse. Yes, I went jumping on trampolines. Yes, I broke my arm. But it could have been my neck. Could have been worse. And the final practice for you is that when something bad happens, before you spiral, just ask yourself one question. How could this have been worse? And generate three specific answers. We often think that thinking about worst-case scenario is not really good because it makes you pessimistic. But actually, I think it's really good because when something bad happens and you realize that it's not as bad as it could have been, you feel blessed, you feel lucky and it builds resilience to negative outcomes. So these are the five behaviors of lucky people and I think the core message here is stay open to people, stay open to opportunities and stay open to good outcomes. There's a concept called the luck surface area and it's essentially the idea that the more you put yourself out there, the more chances luck has to find you. And each one of these five practices grows your luck surface area in a different way. I don't think you have to do all these five practices but just choose the one that speaks most to you and do it tonight.