University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman has been studying luck for the last 17 years. It may seem like a silly thing to study. Isn’t the concept of “luck” just superstitious nonsense? Well, according to Wiseman, luck isn’t a kind of cosmic fate that gets stamped into people’s souls when they are born. Rather, it’s a matter of perspective, awareness, and willingness.

Wiseman came to this conclusion after reading about psychology studies that show how “unlucky” people miss out on lucky opportunities because they are too focused on other things. He conducted further experiments of his own. In one, he gave people a newspaper and asked them to count the number of photos in it. It took an average of two minutes for self-described unlucky people to count all the photos. But people who considered themselves lucky were able to come up with the correct number in a couple of seconds. How? “Because the second page of the newspaper contained a half-page notice with 2-inch tall letters that read: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Wiseman realized that “lucky” people “are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

Was it possible to change unlucky people into lucky people? To answer that question, he started a kind of school to make people luckier. He gave his pupils homework lessons designed to make them think more like a lucky person: “These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.”

Lucky for Wiseman, his school worked! He reported that “80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.”

Are you interested in becoming luckier? Check out Wiseman’s 2003 book, The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles.

Telegraph UK: Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

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