Understanding Attention

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Luck may be less about random chance and more about what becomes visible when we pay attention.

Mindfulness helps us notice opportunities, relationships, and possibilities hidden in plain sight.

Physics and psychology both suggest that observation changes what we experience as reality.

Most of us know someone who seems unbelievably lucky. They hear about a new apartment being for rent before anyone else. They wander into situations that suddenly catapult them into a great new job or project, buy an unimpressive stock, and it suddenly goes up a lot. And when enough of these seemingly random, positive outcomes happen to someone we know, we start to think that some of us just have more luck than others. But what if luck isn't what we think it is? What if the way luck works can be explained by a set of rules rather than the randomness of life?

One of the most forward-thinking researchers in the study of “luck” is the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer. Back in the 1970s, Langer gained recognition for her work on the "illusion of control," our tendency to believe we can influence outcomes that are, to any objective person, governed by random chance. [1] Langer’s research showed that people tend to overestimate their ability to influence random events, such as choosing lottery tickets as though their selection criteria actually matter. [1]We tend to throw dice harder when we want a higher number and more softly when we want a lower one. We act like events governed by chance are under our control even when they’re not.

How Mindfulness Can Increase Luck, According to Ellen Langer

This might seem like bad news for anyone hoping to get lucky. That said, Langer's later research suggests a much more interesting finding. When she shifted her focus from the illusion of control to the practice of mindfulness—not mindfulness in the meditative sense but mindfulness as the active process of noticing—she uncovered a rule that........

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