How to Become Lucky

I am a strong believer that the time we spend at school should be shortened but I will be forever grateful for my maths class on probability and statistics.

We often categorise events or people as lucky or unlucky. We are guilty of using either or scenarios, turning a grey world into black and white. And this is how our brains make sense of things and we manage to survive in life.

We look at celebrities and think they are so lucky; I wish I had that kind of environment growing up, we say. For sure, we can’t manifest blonde hair tomorrow or wake up on a pile of money instead of an orthopaedic mattress.

But our actions, behaviours and mindset can help us put certain odds in our favour. As a life coach and someone who has taken a few risks in life, I also believe that certain elements of luck can be created. Cue my probability class from high school:

An outcome is the possible result of an experiment with each possible outcome for each experiment being unique.

What if we increase the number of experiments?

Proactiveness in randomness

Popular culture advocates leaping at opportunities. I agree but at the same time, what are opportunities exactly? It is such an umbrella term. Do we mean a job opportunity? or a scholarship opportunity? Where do we look for said opportunity?

If opportunities do not knock at your door, then kick the door. Which door? What are we talking about? If we are referring to an obstacle that we come across in life, then the door is the obstacle. But my dear fellow readers, if we wait for the mishaps to show up, then we are letting the universe decide on the problems for us and we will be forever chasing unwanted ones.

Most of us are unclear about what exactly we are aiming for and that is ok. What we need is to be proactive and induce opportunities.

I applaud you if you have a plan and going for it. But even if you don’t, just being proactive about life increases your chances. Random experiences increase the potential for luck and thereby opportunities.

Go to a pot-luck, attend an event on AI or volunteer to give blood. Get out of your chair and sit at a coffee shop. Anything or everything goes.

Cultivate optimism during tough times

We cannot sermon people who are born pessimists or realists to suddenly turn into optimists. As someone who has a sunny predisposition to life, I can vouch for the fact that I need people to bring me down to earth sometimes and avoid optimism-induced troubles.

However, when we strive to find possibilities in the negatives, this increases our chance to find winning situations in terrible situations. We don’t need to turn into eternal optimists to see the glass half full.

To become lucky, we need to reframe our mindset and see the light at the end of the tunnel. We have to develop a new muscle, where we condition ourselves to find salvageable items within difficulties.

Life keeps throwing me stones. And I keep finding the diamonds. — Ana Claudia Antunes

Bouncing back

What’s your bounce-back rate? In other words, how fast can you recover from a situation? And this is not a toxic positivity sign where you dismiss the seriousness of the situation and claim that everything is fine.

Not at all. You can totally acknowledge the gravity of your position while choosing not to ruminate on it.

The longer we dwell on our circumstances, the shorter the exposure to luck. Because nothing good happens while staying in a cycle of negative thinking. We can ponder and stay stuck on something for a long time when we can accept the situation, choose to let go and try a different angle.

Changing vantage points provides new grounds for other things to happen in turn leading to…you guess it….more luck.

While the point above deals with mindset, this one deals with actions.

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Final thoughts

It would be nice to suddenly become an optimist and say affirmative words to change our luck. We can chant our way to appeal to all the gods of the universe, I don’t disagree with the power of our desires and expressing what we want.

But what are you doing about the status quo? If you find yourself in a pickle, how are you going about it? Do you confront the problem and move on? Or do you also use it as a lesson and build your resilience muscle?

Lucky people, in my opinion, are not only those born with a silver spoon or fabulous physical attributes. We can admire them for their good fortune for however long we want, it does not change our current circumstances.

Lucky people see possibilities everywhere and become disruptors, of their own lives but also change the luck of the world.

We don’t say that the world became lucky because some smart dudes invented the internet. The world consists of problems and opportunities and we are part of the world, so at the end of the day, we can choose our luck within this world

Wish you the best of luck 😛

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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