Just My Luck

Two people get the same email late on a Friday: the project they spent three months on has been shelved. One closes the laptop and mutters, "Just my luck." The other sighs and says, "Lucky I found out now, and not three months from now."

Same news. Same luck, if luck is even the right word. But the two sentences point at different things. The first treats luck as weather, something that rolls in from outside and decides how the day goes. The second treats luck as something the speaker already has, a quiet bit of good fortune that is still there on a bad Friday.

It sounds like a difference in phrasing. A study described by Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, suggests it may be closer to a difference in happiness.

Two beliefs that sound alike

In What Happy People Think About Luck, Simon-Thomas starts with a small note about language. The "hap" in happy is the same "hap" in happenstance and perhaps: it means luck or fortune. Plenty of other languages blur being happy and being lucky in the same way.

The study she describes put that overlap to a test. A team of researchers from the UK and Hong Kong surveyed 844 university students in Hong Kong about how they think about luck, how happy they are, and what their personalities are like. Two beliefs pulled apart.

Less happy students tended to believe more strongly in external luck, the "Good luck with that!" kind that decides your fate for better or worse. Happier students were more likely to see themselves as personally lucky.

So there are two beliefs hiding inside one word. Believing in luck hands the outcome to something outside you. Believing you're lucky is closer to a feeling about your own life.

Why the difference might matter

The researchers offer an explanation for each side.

Blaming luck for what happens, they argue, can drain a sense of agency. If luck decides, why plan, practise, or take a risk? A setback stops being information about what to try next and becomes proof that the dice were loaded all along. The study's authors suggest this can dampen the motivation to pursue goals and to learn from mistakes.

Seeing yourself as lucky works differently. The researchers describe it as a variant of optimism or gratitude. It isn't a forecast that good things will keep falling from the sky. It's a habit of noticing the good things that already did. Simon-Thomas adds that people who feel personally lucky may be more willing to try new things, or to help others, because they feel life has been kind to them.

This is where the popular version of the idea goes one step too far. Posts that tell you to always believe you are lucky and blessed make it sound like a promise about the future. The study says something smaller and more useful. The happier students weren't the ones counting on luck to rescue them. They were the ones who felt they already had some.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman arrived somewhere similar from a different direction. After studying 400 people who described themselves as lucky or unlucky, he argued in his book The Luck Factor that the lucky ones tend to notice chance opportunities, expect good fortune, and, when something goes wrong, picture how it could have been worse and look for the part they can still control.

Where the evidence stops

The study has clear edges, and Simon-Thomas names them.

The students answered one survey, once, about themselves. That shows which beliefs and feelings tend to travel together, not which one comes first. It is just as possible that being happier makes people feel luckier as the other way around. Everyone surveyed was a Chinese university student in Hong Kong, and ideas about luck, fate and fortune vary a great deal between cultures.

The biggest twist is personality. Much of the link between believing in outside luck and being less happy turned out to run through neuroticism, a tendency toward worry and negative emotions. People who are prone to worry may simply be more likely to read events as luck working against them.

One detail in the findings is quietly hopeful, though. Among people with more neurotic personalities, those who still saw themselves as personally lucky took less of a hit to their happiness. Even for minds that lean toward worry, the sense of being lucky went along with feeling better.

So the careful version of the lesson isn't "believe you're lucky and you'll be happy." It's closer to this: noticing your own good fortune is something happier people tend to do, and it may be a habit worth practising.

How to practise it

Simon-Thomas points to two Greater Good practices that build the habit of noticing good fortune.

• Three Good Things. At the end of the day, write down three things that went well and what helped them happen. The second half matters: it links good moments to people and choices, not only to chance.
• Finding Silver Linings. Think of something that frustrated you recently and list a few ways it led somewhere good, or still could. This isn't pretending the bad part was fine. It's refusing to let it be the whole story.

One more, as a suggestion of our own rather than anything from the study: listen for "just my luck" in your own voice. When it shows up, try finishing a second sentence that starts with "Lucky that…" Not to deny what went wrong, but to check whether that's really all that happened.

Back on that Friday, the shelved project is still shelved. Nothing about the news changed. What changed is which sentence each person carries into the weekend.

What went your way this week that you never stopped to call lucky?