HOW LUCK HAPPENS

Using the New Science of Luck to Transform Life, Love, and Work

 

PREFACE

 

 

You don’t have to travel very far in Hollywood to encounter men and women driving Uber cars or doing chores for TaskRabbit as they wait for the lucky break that will catapult them to stardom. Many majored in drama in college or starred in a hometown production of Rent—and now they need someone else to notice their talent, too.

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“You have to give yourself a chance to get lucky,” said Cassie, a bright-eyed redhead I met one warm evening at a café on Sunset Boulevard. She was behind the bar, making her signature Moscow mule—vodka, lime, and ginger beer. (I ordered a Diet Coke.) But making the perfect drink wasn’t what kept Cassie going. As we chatted, she told me she had recently graduated college and driven her beat-up Kia two thousand miles west to come to Hollywood. Now she was waiting for the lucky encounter that would make her a star.

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“I just keep saying to myself Harrison Ford,” Cassie said.

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Ah, yes, lucky Harrison. His early adventures are as legendary among acting aspirants as the exploits of Indiana Jones. When he first arrived in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Ford got so little attention for his acting prowess that he started working as a carpenter. A young director who was also starting out hired him to build some cabinets for his house. They got to know and like each other, and the director gave Ford a part in a small movie he was shooting on a minimal budget. It was turned down by six movie studios but eventually became an unexpected, massive hit.

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The movie was American Graffitti. The director was George Lucas. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? A few years later, Lucas got the go-ahead to make another movie the studios didn’t really believe in—Star Wars—and he cast his new buddy Harrison Ford in it.

“You think you’ll find your own George Lucas in the bar?” I asked Cassie when she came over to refill my drink.

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“You bet,” she said with a grin.

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And why not? She had put herself in a place to get lucky, right here at the edge of the Hollywood Hills where many producers and directors live. Maybe the next guy she served would be an executive at Paramount (or at least the Disney Channel) who would spot her potential.

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For Harrison Ford, the chance encounter with Lucas led to the cascade of events that made him one of the biggest stars of his generation. If not for those cabinets, he might never have rocketed to international fame in Star Wars. A different actor would have been frozen in a large block of carbonite as the very cool Han Solo.

The idea that chance events can play such a huge role in a career is both encouraging (“it can happen to me!”) and discouraging (“but what if it doesn’t?”). Many people in Hollywood and elsewhere believe you make your own luck, which explains the would-be screenwriters who have their scripts with them at all times, ready to present to anyone with a friendly face.

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Watching Cassie dash around the café with her big smile and lively chatter, I realized that it was possible I would see her on the big screen someday. But more than a single chance encounter was at play. In moving to Hollywood, working at the bar, and talking to people (like me), she was creating her own opportunities. She had put all the pieces in place to make her own luck.

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We chatted a little more until a friend of mine arrived, and Cassie discovered that I had once been a TV producer with a fun and interesting career. At the end of the evening, when Cassie dropped the bill off at our table, she asked, “Any advice on how I can be one of the lucky ones?”

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“You will be,” I said encouragingly.

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I left a big tip and walked out with an even bigger question spinning in my head.

What could Cassie—or any of us—do to make ourselves one of the lucky ones? Sure, random chance plays a role in life, but we can’t just shrug our shoulders and leave it at that. We have to take the right steps and control what we can.

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I thought of the poem by Emily Dickinson where she wrote that luck isn’t chance, it’s hard work, and “Fortune’s expensive smile / is earned.” I’ve always liked that phrase, and now, as I walked to my car in the warm Los Angeles night, I wondered what it takes to win fortune’s expensive smile. How do we go about making our our own luck?

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I was still thinking about that question when I got back to New York and had afternoon tea with my friend Barnaby Marsh. Having gone to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Barnaby still likes strong tea and scones and I’m always happy to join him. Barnaby is in his early forties, with a quirky, original way of thinking, and he holds appointments at both the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. In other words, he’s the kind of guy you turn to when you’re trying to figure something out.

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So I told him about Cassie and I presented the Harrison Ford conundrum: If the now-famous actor hadn’t met George Lucas, would he still be making his living with a hammer and nails?

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Barnaby sat very still for a minute or two, staring off into the distance, thinking about the problem.

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“It’s complicated,” he said finally. “Unforeseen events—like that meeting with Lucas—can play a role. But if you put enough of the right elements in place, you can take some of the onus off it all being random chance.”

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Well, that sounded promising. I started thinking about what those right elements for creating luck might be. Talent was surely one of them. So was hard work.

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“What advice would you give Cassie?” I asked him.

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He broke off a piece of a scone and munched it thoughtfully. “I’d say that luck is all around us, waiting to be found. But most people walk right by it and don’t realize that it’s there for the taking. There’s enough luck in the world for everyone if you know where to look.”

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So why do we so often miss it? Barnaby turned briefly scientific on me and pointed out that, biologically, the human attention span was set to screen out things that weren’t necessary for survival. Now we needed to turn that instinct on its head and learn to screen things in.

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“Opportunities are all around you, and you just have to learn to see them,” he continued. “There are ways everyone can make themselves luckier.”

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Barnaby was convinced that whether you’re Harrison Ford looking to be an actor, a millennial wanting to find true love, or a corporate executive plotting to be CEO, you have more control over the events in your life than you realize. We often don’t recognize how many things we set in motion by our own actions. Sometimes the seed of opportunity that we plant doesn’t blossom into luck until weeks or months or even years later. When it does, it looks to everyone else like random chance—but we’ve made it happen. Call it planned serendipity.

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Barnaby told me that his research at Oxford had been on risk-taking and he was working on theoretical concepts of luck with his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study. Through his academic work, he was in the process of developing a new and rigorous science of luck.

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“You could say I have a Luck Lab,” he said with a smile.

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It took only a couple more scones to realize that we could be a great team, using his theoretical work as the basis for my more practical approach. Together, we would take the next year to explore all aspects of luck—in love and work and family and finance. Barnaby would be my guide and we would meet weekly to try to answer Cassie’s question about how she could be one of the lucky ones.

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What we ultimately discovered surprised both of us. We found that it wasn’t magic or serendipity or rubbing horseshoes that would make Cassie lucky—it was knowing the right steps to take.  So come join us on our thrilling journey of discovery. The approaches we uncovered are the basic principles  almost guaranteed to bring luck to Cassie and Barnaby and me . . . and you.