Good morning,

How is your summer going so far? When does summer end, in your mind? For me, it’s Labor Day.

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. From tree spirits to papal bulls to Olympic medals… this one will change how you think about luck. 🍀

• You have to check this out. How old do you feel in your head? 👴

• Tools and tech. A better way to read newsletters like this one. 📰

Are you ready to jump in? 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The psychology of luck.

I.

From 500 BCE to 500 CE, Celtic and Germanic cultures worshiped trees.

Celtic druids believed spirits and gods resided in them, especially oaks.

Germanic tribes worshipped in sacred groves and believed in Yggdrasil (The World Tree), the cosmic ash tree connecting the nine worlds in Norse mythology.

They shared one ritual thought to summon the protection of tree spirits, express gratitude for good fortune, and ward off one of the favorite pastimes of evil spirits—overhearing your good news and spoiling it.

What was this ritual? Knocking on wood.

II.

As Christianity spread across Europe, one thing became particularly associated with bad luck, witchcraft, and Satan: the black cat. 🐈‍⬛

In 1233, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull condemning the veneration of cats as heretical.

Over the next 100+ years, cats were killed in large numbers.

How did this attempt to eradicate the feline sources of bad luck go?

Around 1350, the bubonic plague (Black Death) swept across Europe, killing an estimated 30-60% of the population. By comparison, in 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 killed approximately 0.30% of the European population (and 0.35% of the US population).

The bubonic plague was transmitted by fleas carried by rats.

Why were there so many rats?

That's right, you guessed it. While the causes of the plague were many, the widespread eradication of the "bad luck" cats played a big role.

Our sophisticated, modern era.

Luckily, these outdated superstitions no longer plague us, right? Knock on wood. Haha.

As you know, pagan superstitions are very much still with us. We are not just a little stitious… we remain super-stitious.

In a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll in February 2015, 60% of Americans said they were not superstitious. But here are four behaviors they admitted to doing regularly:

Stevie Wonder laid it out in 1972:

Understanding luck.

I’ve heard that song many times, including live (one of the coolest shows I’ve ever been to, Janelle Monáe was the opener), but I’ll admit I never listened carefully to this line:

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer.

Can we really understand luck?

And if we understood it more, would we suffer less?

Can we enhance the amount of luck we encounter in our lives, without knocking on wood and rabbit’s feet?

Professor Richard Wiseman decided to find out.

In the early 2000s, he placed ads in national newspapers and magazines asking for people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky to contact him.

400 people joined his research: businessmen, factory workers, teachers, doctors, salespeople, and others.

Some of them lived charmed lives: Jessica, a forty-two-year-old forensic scientist, said good fortune helped her achieve many of her lifelong ambitions. "I have my dream job, two wonderful children, and a great guy that I love very much. It's amazing. When I look back at my life, I realize that I have been lucky in just about every area,” she explained.

Patricia, on the other hand, was cursed: She started working as cabin crew for an airline, and quickly gained a reputation as being accident-prone and a bad omen.

As Wisemen described it, “One of her first flights had to make an unplanned stopover because some passengers had become drunk and abusive. Another of Patricia's flights was struck by lightning, and just weeks later a third flight was forced to make an emergency landing.

“Patricia was also convinced that her ill fortune could be transferred to others and so never wished people good luck, because this had caused them to fail important interviews and exams. She is also unlucky in love and has staggered from one broken relationship to the next. Patricia never seems to get any lucky breaks and always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Wiseman wanted to understand what was behind Jessica, Patricia, and the other study volunteers' lucky and unlucky experiences. He interviewed them. They completed diaries, personality questionnaires, and intelligence tests. They went to Wiseman's lab to participate in experiments.

“You make your own luck.”

Hemingway had it partially right with that quote.

Wiseman’s research found that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance and that people are not born lucky or unlucky.

Most interestingly, he found lucky and unlucky people had no understanding of the causes of their good and bad luck. They weren’t consciously making their own luck.

Instead, Wiseman found that lucky people unknowingly created their good fortune through their thoughts and behaviors.

He found four key ways lucky people generated good fortune in their lives:

1. Lucky people create and notice chance opportunities.

Lucky people expose themselves to new situations, meet more people, and stay open to the unexpected. They break routines and invite variety in their lives.

In my favorite of Wiseman’s experiments, he gave the study participants a newspaper and asked them to flip through it and tell him how many photographs were in it.

The unlucky participants took about two minutes to count the photos, while the lucky participants completed the task in just seconds.

Why? On page two of the paper, Wiseman placed a half-page ad (with type that was over two inches high) saying, "Stop counting—there are 43 photographs in this newspaper."

This huge ad was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people overlooked it while the lucky people spotted it.

Through personality tests, Wiseman found that the unlucky participants were generally more tense and anxious than the lucky participants.

Pessimism, fear, and anxiety narrow and focus your attention. Optimism and positive emotions broaden your attention. I wrote about this two weeks ago in my letter Understanding Optimism in Midlife.

Wiseman also noticed his lucky participants went to great lengths to introduce variety and change into their lives. I'll cover this more in the section Luck School below.

Lucille Ball said, “Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.”

2. Lucky people listen to their hunches.

They trust their intuition when making decisions, especially in uncertain situations. They create space for those signals by staying calm and paying attention.

Lucky people trust their gut when the way forward isn’t clear. They pay attention to the quiet signals most of us overlook. That takes creating space for intuition to surface—stepping back, calming the noise, giving themselves room to think.

Wiseman found that they often made decisions more quickly and accurately because they weren’t paralyzed by second-guessing. Unlucky people, on the other hand, tend to get stuck in analysis or hesitate until the opportunity slips away.

In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcom Gladwell detailed our ability to make surprisingly accurate judgments and decisions in the blink of an eye, often based on very limited information. He argued that these instinctive decisions, rooted in our subconscious, can be just as good, or even better, than those made through careful, deliberate analysis.

3. Lucky people expect good fortune.

Optimism matters. People who believe good things will happen act in ways that make those things more likely.

Lucky people walk through life assuming good things will happen. This belief shapes their actions. They approach conversations openly, try new things, and keep going when others give up.

Expectations shift behavior subtly—they makes you approachable, confident, and ready to notice what's in front of you. Over time, those actions compound.

4. Lucky people see bad luck differently.

No one lives without ill fortune.

Imagine you were on the Olympic Team. You decide: 400m race, 200m backstroke, fencing.

You compete in the games, do very well, and win a bronze medal. 🥉 How happy do you feel?

Now imagine you can go back in time and try again. This time you do a bit better and win the silver medal. 🥈 How happy do you feel now? After all, second place is certainly better than third.

But research finds that bronze medalists are consistently happier than silver medalists.

Why? The bronze medalists compare their situation to not winning any medal, while the silver medalists compare their situation to not winning a gold medal.

Psychologists call this “what might have been” framing counter-factual thinking.

Wiseman found his unlucky participants spent more time ruminating on past events, wondering what might have been if they had taken a different path or made a different decision.

On the contrary, lucky participants “tend to imagine spontaneously how the bad luck they encounter could have been worse and, in doing so, they feel much better about themselves and their lives,” Wiseman said.

Luck School

Wiseman's research led him to wonder: Can you enhance people’s good luck by teaching them to think and behave like lucky people?

His results were dramatic. After attending Wiseman’s self-described Luck School—where they learned the four principles above and how to apply them—80% of people said they were happier, more satisfied with their lives, and yes, luckier.

One of the lessons from Luck School really intrigues me: expanding your exposure to opportunity.

Wiseman found his lucky participants purposefully injected novelty into their lives. Before making a big decision, one participant would deliberately alter his route to work, mixing things up to expand his thinking.

Another participant used a novel technique to force himself to meet different types of people. Before attending a social gathering, he would pick a color and then only engage in conversations with people wearing that color of clothing.

Wiseman found unusual systems like these increased the number of chance opportunities in people’s lives. More opportunities mean more luck.

The author Nassim Taleb talked about a related idea he calls “optionality” in his book Antifragile.

You can’t predict which door will open, but you can design your life so that doors are constantly within reach—and you’re ready when one finally swings open,” Adam Tank explains.

I’ll leave you with this closing line from the comedian-philosopher Steven Wright:

I broke a mirror in my house.

I'm supposed to get seven years of bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

Thanks for reading, my friend.

See you next Sunday,

Kevin

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