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Continuing on my quest to better learn how to be lucky, I’m following up on my mini-review of Max Gunther’s book, The Luck Factor (Creating Luck: The Luck Factor). This time I’m discussing the book I set out to read in the first place: The Luck Factor: Change your luck – and change your life, by Dr. Richard Wiseman. It was published in 2003 and doesn’t contain any mention of Gunther’s book of the same name from 1977. They do have several things in common. However, Wiseman conducted research to back his claims, and also presents more elements of luck overall than Gunther. I’ll compare the five main points from Gunther’s book to Wiseman’s four principles and some of their 12 sub-principles. I’m really only paying attention to part four of Gunther, as I did with my earlier review.
Wiseman starts right in to the useful stuff after two chapters of introduction. In “Principle One: Maximise Your Chance Opportunities” he starts the same way Gunther did, talking about how a strong social network increases our luck. Wiseman goes on to tie in having a relaxed attitude, saying that luck is inversely proportional to neuroticism (one of the “Big Five” personality traits). The next sub-principle is about being open to new experiences, similar to Gunther’s “Fortune Favors the Bold” concept. “Openness” is another of the big five personality traits.
Principle two, “Listen to Your Lucky Hunches” matches with Gunther’s “Hunching Skill” concept. I felt that Gunther gave some more actionable advice here, despite not having research backing his ideas, and I especially like how he distinguishes between wishful thinking and informed hunches. In any case, for those of us who aren’t attuned to our own intuition, it’s worth studying.
Principle three in Wiseman’s book is “Expect Good Fortune”. I don’t see a close analog from Gunther, in fact, his “Pessimism Paradox” is basically the opposite. Both actually work well together. Wiseman’s principle is basically the power of positive thinking, and he gives several helpful angles on it. Gunther focuses on being prepared when Murphy’s Law strikes, and to expect that it always will. I believe we can benefit from both of these principles, as long as we don’t try to peg ourselves as entirely optimists or pessimists.
Wiseman’s principle four, “Turn Your Bad Luck Into Good” is hard to characterize. It overlaps a lot with the positive thinking in principle 3. One sub-principle, “Lucky people take constructive steps to prevent more bad luck in the future” hits some of the same points as Gunther’s “The Ratchet Effect”.
Overall, Wiseman comes across as more credible because of the research behind his book, and he devotes much of the book to the analysis of specific things that make some people much luckier than others. In addition, he includes several exercises to help you analyze how to improve your own luck, and the last section of the book further discusses how to learn to be lucky. However, I should note that Gunther’s book was an easier read, and it covers enough unique ground that it’s worthwhile as well. Both books have numerous interesting anecdotes of real people who either have unusually bad or good luck.
Some people respond to this topic with a big “duh, I know all that stuff.” In fact, the people who stand the most to gain are those with the worst luck. I hope they find these books. For me, I have more to learn about how to listen to my hunches, and though I think my attitude toward the things that contribute to my luck is already pretty relaxed, there are a few improvements I can make here as well.
Have you done anything to learn about what to do about your bad luck, or how to have even better luck? I’m curious to hear about it.
swalchemist 
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Great compare/contrast between Gunther and Wiseman. Nice job distilling it down to a blog post. I like the practical actionable items.
I think it curious that both books seem to analyze essentially random events (lucks), as if analysis could change a random event’s nature. It might, of course, be true that what we refer to as luck is actually something less inherently random and if so, why persist on calling it luck? Why not correct the misattribution from the outset by claiming that what we call luck, isn’t. It’s this other analyzable experience instead. This perspective might be related to what’s called The Lake Woe-Be-Gone Effect, the belief that through diligent selection one might create a population where every member’s above average. I’m wondering if following the advice might just make repetitions more obvious so results seem improved. I’m fairly certain that there’s no do-overs that turn an experience of bad luck into good except by clever reframing, whereby every experience might be reconsidered as lucky whatever it seemed initially. Aren’t they talking about how to improve the results of tossing dice?
Thanks for your comments. I consider myself fairly lucky, and my interest in this topic is to understand why, and therefore perhaps improve my luck further.
If we think of games of pure chance, then talking about improving our luck doesn’t make sense. But many games, like poker, and life, have a mix of random chance and factors that we can control. Maybe there’s a better word than “luck” for this messy real-life mixture of influences, but I’m not sure what it is. I think Gunther’s book does talk a bit about differentiating between pure chance where we can’t improve our odds, and situations where we can manipulate the results in our favor.
You mention reframing, which Wiseman’s book talks about in terms of having a positive attitude, which I do think can impact future outcomes. It doesn’t come across to me as useless whitewash.