In an attempt to dis­cover whether there were gen­uine per­son­al­ity traits that sep­a­rate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wise­man stud­ied 400 peo­ple over a num­ber of years and dis­cov­ered that there are indeed behav­ioural dif­fer­ences between the lucky and luck­less—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck.

Wise­man states that the lucky “gen­er­ate good for­tune via four basic principles”:

  • Cre­at­ing and notic­ing chance opportunities.
  • Mak­ing lucky deci­sions by lis­ten­ing to their intuition.
  • Cre­at­ing self-fulfilling proph­e­sies via pos­i­tive expectations.
  • Adopt­ing a resilient atti­tude that trans­forms bad luck into good.

And by real­is­ing this and fol­low­ing three sim­ple tech­niques, you can improve your luck:

  1. Fol­low your intu­ition and respect hunches in deci­sion making.
  2. Intro­duce vari­ety into your life.
  3. See the pos­i­tive side of mis­for­tune: imag­ine how things could be worse.

Of the peo­ple that fol­lowed this advice, 80% iden­ti­fied improve­ments to their luck and over­all happiness.