How to Get Lucky

This book is called How to Get Lucky, and its first claim is that there is no such thing as luck.

That is not a trick.

Most of us have a lucky number, a lucky shirt, or a quiet habit of knocking on wood. In my years in Thailand, I met many people who were certain their luck could be read, repaired or bought. What I have never found is any evidence that luck exists.

Chance exists. Chance is simply what happens: the screw on the road, the numbered ball dropping from the machine, the country you happened to be born in. It follows the laws of statistics, and it has no favourites. Luck is something else. Luck is the story we tell about chance: that it was meant for us, that it can be courted, that some people carry it and others do not.

In Why We Believe, I explored how belief shapes what we notice, what we remember and what we do. This book follows that thread into one of the oldest beliefs of all. I will argue that luck works like a god of the gaps, filling the space between what we did and what happened. It also works like a self-fulfilling prophecy, quietly shaping our behaviour until the belief appears confirmed. Karma, its moral twin, does the same work with a ledger attached.

I have been a pharmacist for more than thirty years. On an ordinary day I check around 7,500 pieces of information. I would never leave those checks to luck, and no patient would want me to. Yet many of us leave our most important decisions to exactly that.

So this book has two purposes. The first is to show, with the best science available, why luck is not real. The second is practical. None of us can control chance, but all of us can change how exposed we are to it, and how we respond when it arrives. In the only sense that matters, that is how you become luckier.

One more thing belongs at the start. Because luck isn't real, bad luck isn't a judgement. Illness, accident, war and poverty fall on people who did nothing to deserve them. If this book makes you a little more careful with your own choices, and a little kinder about other people's misfortunes, it will have done its work.

Stuart Corlett