How to Become Lucky in Life

“Never go to the beach at 1p on a Saturday in July!” I told myself as I entered the parking lot, for what seemed like the hundredth reminder of the summer.

After ten minutes of circling, I was blessed with the good timing of being able to follow a family back to their car. As I turned my blinker on, I felt a wave of victory, for I had at last found a mythical parking spot. The cooler and plastic shovels were loaded into the back, sand was toweled off from their feet, and the kiddos strapped into their seats. After five minutes of holding up the line of cars behind me, they backed out of the spot and I was the proud new inhabitant of the very last parking spot in the lot.

Triumphantly, I gathered the beach gear and started to make my way through the parking lot, looking for signs of Tiffany. The expressions of drivers moving past me changed from hopeful to discouraged as they realized I was arriving at, not leaving from, the beach. 

“She’s never going to find parking.” I found myself thinking. “Do we have a backup plan?” 

As I made my way to the front of the lot, there she was, sitting peacefully in her car, parked neatly in the very first spot.

“What the heck?!” I exclaimed. “How did you do that?!”

“I have good parking karma,” Tiffany said nonchalantly as she emerged from the driver's seat.

Her statement sent a wave of shock up my spine. I almost tripped over the chord of my boogie board. 

This was the first time I had ever heard someone boast of good luck. Most people I knew talked exclusively of their bad luck, lamenting about what’s going wrong in life. But here was Tiffany, beaming from ear to ear, ready for a fun day at the beach, completely unphased at the stressful mess of a parking lot everyone else seemed to be flustered by.

And so I found myself utterly intrigued at the idea of luck and the role it plays in our lives.

What is Luck?

But first: a definition. What is luck? Luck is whatever is outside of our control. It’s the right-place-right-time element, or conversely, the wrong-place-wrong-time element. 

Luck is the friend who shows up at our house unexpectedly when they’re passing through town. Luck is the hungry bear who is on a mission to grab the next fish that swims by. Luck is the five dollar bill crumpled up on an open sidewalk. Luck is a sold out concert when you’ve been waiting weeks for tickets to go on sale.

Everyone is lucky sometimes, and everyone is unlucky sometimes. Could it be that when you add up the good luck one encounters over the course of a lifetime, that some people experience more good luck, and other people experience more bad luck? 

Perhaps.

But I’m not interested in how much luck an individual has; rather, I’m concerned about what we do with good luck when it visits.

How to Be Lucky in Life

The first thing that struck me about Tiffany’s good parking luck was that she openly acknowledged it. Not only that, she embraced it like it was her best friend. I had never seen someone embrace their luck so openly, so lovingly. It’s like she was so sure that parking karma was on her side, it would never dawn on her that parking could be an issue.

Now, I’ve had some amazing parking spots in my life, but I’ve never once exclaimed, “The parking gods are on my side! How wonderful to be so lucky in life!” When I get an unusually great parking spot, it feels good of course (I’m not a psycho), but it’s quickly covered up by whatever the next task is.

Tiffany’s reaction to her good luck got me thinking: Perhaps the people who experience the most good luck in life are the ones who actively exploit it. Perhaps luck visits the fellow who thanks it, who dotes on it, who takes advantage of the blessings it brings. 

Luck & Success

Better be lucky than good, the saying goes. 

We all know people who are more successful than they ought to be. Why is George doing so well? He’s not smarter than me, or more charismatic than me, or sharper than me. No, George is doing so well because he’s lucky.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking that way? I have on occasion. It’s easy to pin someone else’s success on luck. 

Luck is a component of success, because luck is a component of life. But luck is only a catalyst, a starter pistol. Luck can turn you into a one-hit-wonder, but it cannot turn you into a rock star legend. To become a rock star legend, you need to be savvy enough to identify luck when it visits you, and then exploit the hell out of it. 

Why does Tiffany consistently get such great parking spots? It’s not because she’s smarter or sharper than everyone else. She is simply attuned to her luck, thanks her luck, appreciates her luck, and emphasizes her wins. She shows up to the beach unphased by the crowds, confident in her ability to find parking, while the rest of us merry-go-round the parking lot, turning up the air conditioning to offset the sweating that builds up with each circle around the lot.

Luck & Skill

The first time’s luck, the second time is skill. 

I know a successful yoga studio owner in San DIego. He helped me plan the opening of my own yoga studio in Chicago many years ago. As we worked through the plans, he suggested many ideas that had worked well for him in San Diego. Yet, when I deployed them for my own studio in Chicago, they fell completely flat. 

When I was able to stand back and look at the situation more clearly, I realized that a lot of the tactics I had tried were not industry best practices, they were merely ideas that happened to work out for him in his market because he was in the right place at the right time when he opened his studio.  

No doubt, his continued success in the yoga industry is a matter of hard work and skill. He understands leadership and budgeting and organizational development. But the ideas he gave me to try out didn’t work for me because it was not the right place or time for those ideas to take off in my market. We had many conversations that amounted to him scratching his head, pondering why the same tactics had worked so well for him, yet for me, they hardly made a dent.

This is why it’s vitally important to correctly identify what gifts have been earned through skill and hard work, versus which gifts were bestowed upon us by luck.

For him, the timing of him opening his studio, the studio’s location, the competitive landscape - these were lucky components that made certain tactics work for him. He had misdiagnosed these ideas as skill on his part, which gave him the false confidence that they could be replicated in any market under any condition and still be successful. That would be true if the ideas were a product of skill. Skill can be replicated. Skill can be scaled. Skill can be systematized. Luck is more mysterious than that. We don’t control when luck enters our lives.

There will always be a component of luck in success. Yet many successful people I know aren’t willing to acknowledge the role luck plays in their lives. Ultimately, this is none of my business, except that I can see they feel alienated from other people. They are confused why other people don’t want to be close to them, they are confused by other peoples’ actions and perspectives, they are confused when things don’t work out as they expected.

The best thing we can do is be clear with ourselves about the distinction between luck and skill in our own lives. Luck will open doors for us, skill will move us through the doorway. 

Becoming Lucky

Luck is all around us. It’s always on the way to us. Some people, like my friend Tiffany, are primed to take advantage of their luck. These people will be happier and more successful. The luckiest people in life are the ones who openly acknowledge and thank their luck.

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