Practical tips for business people who need luck on their side

Something as vague and indiscernible as “luck” has no place in the business world, right? Yet studies show luck can make all the difference between business success and failure. So, can you learn how to be lucky?

Joël Le Bon, professor of marketing and sales at Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, has found that luck is a significant factor in sales professionals’ performance. He even says companies can manage their luck to get a competitive edge.

Turns out, it’s not a matter of being born lucky. You can, quite literally, make your own luck in business and in life.

Here’s how entrepreneurs and other business people can build their belief in luck to achieve more.

Luck Can Be Made and Managed

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, a professor at England’s University of Hertfordshire, has conducted several studies on luck. His most prominent was a long-term study that became the foundation for his book The Luck Factor: Over the course of 10 years, he interviewed 400 volunteers who self-identified as lucky or unlucky, had them participate in experiments, and asked them to keep diaries and take personality questionnaires and intelligence tests.

Based on that study, Wiseman concluded that lucky people generate their good fortune by following four principles:

Create and notice chance opportunities
Make lucky decisions by listening to one’s intuition
Form “self-fulfilling prophecies” through positive expectations
Adopt a resilient attitude to turn bad luck into good

For example, Wiseman describes that many of his lucky participants intentionally pursued variety and change in their lives.: One would regularly take a different route to work, while another would choose a color before going to a party and make an effort to talk to people wearing that color to diversify the type of people he tended to talk to

Psychologist @RichardWiseman conducted several studies on #luck and concluded that lucky people generate their good fortune by following four principles… Share on X

Le Bon calls that kind of self-made luck “provoked luck.” Experienced salespeople, he found, “tend to say that an important factor in their jobs is provoked luck: unexpected events that come about because their strategic behavior has maximized the opportunities.”

In one of Le Bon’s studies of sales students, they reported that two-thirds of the revenue they made through sales was due to provoked luck. Le Bon found that luck was a huge motivator: The more a salesperson believed in luck, the more sales activities they pursued, such as making phone calls, taking meetings, and qualifying prospects, which led to more opportunities and better performance.

Entrepreneurs, salespeople, and other business people can take purposeful steps to grow their luck and success.

Stylized four leaf clover, representing how to be lucky

How to Be Lucky: Enroll in “Luck School”

As Wiseman and Le Bon found, people are not born lucky or unlucky. Luck and fortune are primarily molded by people’s thoughts and behaviors—which can be modified.

To test that, Wiseman held a “luck school” in which he conducted experiments to improve people’s luck by getting them to act lucky. He asked participants to complete standard questionnaires measuring their luck and satisfaction with six life areas. Next, he explained to participants how “lucky” people use the four principles of luck; he shared techniques for how they could think and behave like a lucky person. The techniques would help them create chance opportunities, vary their daily routines, and deal more effectively with lousy luck by imagining how things could have been worse.

After practicing those techniques for a month, the participants shared their findings with Wiseman. He reported that 80 percent of participants said they were happier with their lives and felt luckier.

You can put yourself through “luck school.” Here’s how:

1. Maximize Chance Opportunities

Change your habits and routines to create chance opportunities. Maintain a flexible mindset rather than committing to one way of doing things. Step out of your comfort zone. Make time to meet new people—and, like Wiseman’s lucky participant, try using a hack that forces you to talk to a range of people.

Chat with someone in line at the grocery store or stop to play a spontaneous chess game with a stranger in a park. That will not only spark connections, conversations, and ideas but also feed your brain’s need for novelty.

“Salespeople should be encouraged to disrupt their habits, get out of their routines and comfort zones, and meet new people,” Le Bon wrote. “They should do new things, expand their networks by going to unusual places, and build new alliances. In sales, opportunities lie not among the people you know but among those you don’t.”

2. Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Our intuition is often thought of as irrational and unreliable. But, Wiseman argues, by ignoring gut instincts, “you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you’ve built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That’s what our brains are set up to do.”

Ditch the inner critic and self-limiting beliefs holding you back to build your self-trust and confidence. Consider listing out past successes you enjoyed because of an intuitive move you made. You’ll likely recall that many of your best decisions were made because they “felt right.”

3. Expect Good Fortune

Belief in luck increases the likelihood of taking risks, which, in turn, increases the probability of success. While it’s not wise to set unachievable goals that set you up for failure, you should set high goals and carry a positive outlook as you work toward them.

Le Bon says there are benefits to setting challenging goals: “Salespeople should be encouraged to adopt such goals because they drive forward-looking behaviors. Ambitious goals make salespeople more creative and strategic.”

4. Turn Bad Luck into Good

Sometimes, bad things happen that make you feel inherently “unlucky.” In those moments, it’s crucial to maintain traction—actions that move you toward what you want.

When something bad happens, be kind to yourself. Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.

Try Wiseman’s positive-reframing technique and imagine how the situation could have been worse. Or use Le Bon’s technique to be more comfortable with failure: He encourages companies with sales teams to have their employees set failure goals, like a number of monthly pitches that fall flat.

Luck is nothing but a mindset. Even if you’ve been having a streak of bad luck, you can turn it around by learning how to change your fortune.

How to Be Lucky in Business and Life: 4 Science-Backed Principles