Crafting Luck: Four Easy Steps to Become a Lucky Writer

The concept of luck has always been an interest of mine. I’m talking about people winning the lottery for 50 million dollars or a family of five killed in an accident. It just confounds me the concept of chance and luck. I don’t think it’s very healthy to think too deeply about it. About how much of one’s life is reliant upon luck, as you can’t change how lucky you are.

Right??

Wrong!

After doing some research on luck and what it means to be lucky, I stumbled upon a book called ‘The Luck Factor’ by Richard Wiseman. This book has definitely expanded my insight into what it means to be a ‘lucky person’ or an ‘unlucky person’.

Wiseman interviewed many people who think of themselves as lucky or unlucky people, he then compared similarities between what lucky people were doing and what unlucky people weren’t doing. He then came up with 4 guiding principles for a luckier life.

I have extracted the juice of these 4 main principles for you in this post and I will reveal to you how you can be a luckier person, specifically, a luckier writer. However, please do read Wiseman’s book, it’s really, really interesting.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Lucky Principle 1- Get Into More Chance Opportunities

Wisemen found that people who considered themselves lucky often found themselves speaking to someone, randomly, and by some chance, these people provided them with amazing opportunities that they were specifically looking for.

This means that the more connections you make with people, the higher your chances of talking to people who have opportunities for you to be a part of.

Therefore, for us to become luckier writers we need to build a web of relationships, we need to put ourselves out there.

You can do this by having discussions with people who are commenting on your writing or, as scary as it is, just talking to people in random places, such as in a queue or a shop.

Lucky Principle 2- Listen to Hunches

There’s this weird thing inside our monkey brain that knows when you are in danger or when something feels off, often referred to as a ‘gut feeling’ or a ‘hunch’ There are thousands of stories of people ignoring their gut feelings to their own detriment as well as acting on their hunches and benefiting from it.

These cues in your brain will tell you what direction you should be moving, this is key for writers.

We need to know what ideas will catch on and what ones will be left by the wayside, thus when pondering a potential story or idea listen to your internal cues and act accordingly.

Lucky Principle 3- Expect Good Things

A common theme in Wiseman’s interviews was the optimism of the lucky people and the pessimism of the unlucky people.

Especially in the spiritual part of self-improvement the power of thought is usually referred to as why individuals feel and act the way they do, it is thought that the way one thinks significantly affects how that person experiences their daily life.

Thus, if you think you’re going to have bad luck all you’ll see are the unlucky things that happen to you and thus you feel unlucky making you focus on the unlucky things in your life. This is how the unlucky people in Wiseman’s study adopted their pessimistic point of view.

Therefore, for us writers, we need to be hyper-aware of our thoughts, we need to make sure we are optimistic about our writing, we must believe we will meet our writing goals and we will achieve these lucky writing feats.

Lucky Principle 4- See the Lucky in the Unlucky

This last principle is very similar to the previous one, but this one is focused more on the willful optimism of lucky people.

Lucky people believe in themselves and that the events that happen to them always have a silver lining. This thought process obviously defaults the individual to seeing the beautiful in the ugly and is just a generally great way to go about your life.

We as writers can use this principle by noticing the things that are making us spiteful or sad and trying to see the good in them.

A great way to do this is to think about the problem and ask yourself,

“How is this the best thing that has ever happened to me?”

I have found this prompt to be an amazing reflective device.

In Conclusion…

The four applicable steps to becoming a luckier writer are;

1. Talk to more people to maximize chance encounters
2. Always listen to your hunches
3. Adopt an optimistic outlook on your life and writing
4. Ask yourself when faced with a problem “How is this the best thing that’s ever happened to me?”

Thank you for reading, don’t forget to check out The Luck Factor, and have a great day 🙂