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How to Become Luckier - An Evidence-Based Guide

2022-12-22 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 12:42 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing, Sponsor segment present

In a Book Club episode on Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor, Ali sets out Wiseman's four luck principles (chance opportunities, intuition, optimistic expectations, resilience) and five of his tips, adding his own takeaways on networking and goals.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Can you become luckier? Book Club on The Luck Factor

  • ★★ This video is Ali's Book Club episode on The Luck Factor, the book by psychology professor Richard Wiseman, whom he recently had on his Deep Dive podcast. — 00:00:00 · Book Club, Deep Dive
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Richard Wiseman has run studies on over a thousand people comparing those who rate themselves lucky, unlucky or neutral. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): From his studies Wiseman and his team drew principles and strategies anyone can apply from today to substantially increase their luck. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's first luck principle: lucky people create, notice and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives. — 00:00:29

00:00:46 — The four luck principles: opportunities, intuition, expectations, resilience

  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): In Wiseman's studies, people who rated themselves unlucky tended to focus on planning and on getting certainty before making decisions, while lucky people tried things out. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): In Wiseman's studies, more extroverted people tended to be luckier because they met more people and struck up conversations with strangers; more relaxed people were also luckier. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): According to Wiseman's findings, people become luckier when they become open to new experiences rather than repeating the same routine. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's second luck principle: lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings, treating a gut feeling as an alarm bell. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman found that 90% of people who identified as lucky tended to trust their intuition. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): 80% of the lucky people in Wiseman's studies said intuition and gut feeling played a really important role in their career. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali explains that a bad feeling about something is the subconscious integrating many signals, so it can be taken seriously as an alarm bell not to do it. — 00:03:24
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's third luck principle: lucky people's expectations about the future help them fulfil their ambitions; they are optimists, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Ali traces the Pygmalion effect to a classic 1968 study by Harvard psychologists on how teachers' expectations affected their students' performance. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ In Ali's account of the Pygmalion study, teachers treated the randomly labelled students differently and those students did worse; a label of being bad at something or low expectations contributes to performance. — 00:04:23
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's fourth luck principle: lucky people are resilient and able to transform their bad luck into good fortune. — 00:04:23
  • ★★ Ali thinks resilience is probably the most important of Wiseman's four luck principles. (hedged) — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): On Ali's podcast Wiseman told of a man who broke his leg falling down the stairs and called it the single best thing that ever happened to him: in hospital he fell in love with a nurse, and 25 years later they are happily married. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Martin Seligman (quoted): Martin Seligman, founder of the positive psychology movement, wrote that optimists endure the same storms as pessimists but weather them better and emerge better off. — 00:05:27

00:05:48 — Five evidence-based tips: luck diary, network of luck, approachability, lucky goals, the bright side

  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's first technique is a luck diary: like a gratitude journal, and added to a journaling habit, it helps you notice lucky opportunities in life. — 00:05:56
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): The luck diary has to be written, not just thought: a written record of how fortunate you are starts to change your self-perception. — 00:06:25
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): The Luck Factor's second technique is to build a network of luck: people who make the most of their network opportunities in a non-weird way tend to be luckier. — 00:07:02
  • ★★★ Ali traces all the good things in his life to serendipitous encounters with random people, on Twitter, in the street or at conferences, because he put himself out there. — 00:07:02 · Twitter
  • ★★ Ali used to strike up conversations with strangers while working on his confidence but stopped, now staying on his phone or audiobooks, and thinks he has probably let many opportunities pass. (hedged) — 00:07:31
  • ★★ Ali takes from The Luck Factor the practical tip of striking up conversations and maintaining his network of friends, colleagues and associates. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's Connect Four exercise: every week make it your job to speak to someone you don't know, in a shop, a coffee shop or on the bus. — 00:08:00
  • ★ Ali plans to try Wiseman's contact game himself. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's contact game: get in touch with someone you haven't contacted for a while, by text, voice note or a random phone call, to maintain your network of luck. — 00:08:29
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's research team could tell at first glance who would consider themselves lucky: they looked cheerful with open body language, while the unlucky looked closed off and anxious. — 00:08:29
  • ★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's third technique is to become more approachable: with warm, open body language people are more inclined to talk to you, which is how lucky events happen. — 00:09:28
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's fourth technique is to set lucky goals: optimistic rather than pessimistic, since ambitious targets make you more likely to work towards and achieve them. — 00:09:28
  • ★★★ Ali has realised over time that it is fine to set an ambitious, optimistic goal while recognising that the journey matters more than the destination. — 00:10:03
  • ★★ Ali's issue with goals has always been that with an ambitious goal it is very easy to tie your self-worth to achieving it, so missing it feels really bad. — 00:10:03
  • ★★ Ali thinks having a goal while being non-attached to the outcome gets the best of both worlds. — 00:10:32
  • ★★★ Richard Wiseman (quoted): Wiseman's fifth technique is to look on the bright side: focusing on the good that came out of a bad event, reframing failure as learning, helps you bounce back and become more resilient. — 00:10:32

00:11:02 — Nebula interviews and the CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:12:29 — Pointer to the Make Time Book Club episode and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Richard Wiseman · The Luck Factor

Also: People: Jake Knapp · John Zeratsky · Martin Seligman

Projects: Book Club · Deep Dive

Works: Make Time

Organizations: Harvard University · Twitter

Concepts: luck diary · Pygmalion effect · reframing failure

Also centred on The Luck Factor: 15 Incredible Books to Read in 2026

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