How to Get Lucky in Life and Take Smarter Risks

Is luck real? The scientific answer may surprise you. Psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted extensive research on people who claim to have good or bad luck, and he discovered that lucky people behave in ways that create good fortune.

As a scientist, Wiseman is known for disproving alleged “paranormal” powers, but his research into the nature of luck led him to conclude that it exists, if only psychologically. In The Luck Factor, Wiseman explores the science behind luck and how you can improve yours by deliberately applying the unconscious methods that lucky people use.

In this guide, we’ll cover how people create the luck that governs their lives by trusting intuition, seizing opportunities, and turning bad luck into good. We’ll contrast Wiseman’s views with those of other psychologists and productivity experts, and we’ll suggest practical ways to apply Wiseman’s advice.

Usually, when we see someone fabulously successful, we attribute her success to skill. But skill will generally only earn a person moderate success. Wild success, the kind that comes with outsized wealth and lasting fame, is usually due to luck: a fortunate rare event plus a lack of negative rare events.

In Fooled by Randomness, former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb examines the outsized role luck plays in success, how and why people don’t generally understand luck, and how we can accommodate randomness in our lives once we’re aware of it. Taleb primarily focuses on examples from the world of investing, but his principles are applicable to any field ruled by unpredictability (such as economics or politics) and demonstrate how we’re fooled by randomness in many aspects of our lives.

In business, as in life, the only thing certain is uncertainty. How, then, can companies survive—even thrive—when the future is unpredictable? In Great by Choice, authors Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen shed some light on why some companies weather great adversity better than others.

Using nine years of research and offering plenty of real-world examples, the authors debunk long-held myths when it comes to highly successful companies and present the tools that these enterprises use to help them weather tumultuous times. The book’s overarching message: Luck doesn’t determine your fate—you do. And you can make the choice to become something great, whatever the circumstance.

Do you feel like the job market is changing faster than ever? Does job stability seem like a thing of the past? In The Startup of You, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha argue that to build a successful career in the modern world, you must approach your career as if it were a startup company—something that’s always growing and adapting. By applying principles of entrepreneurship to your career, you can overcome unexpected career obstacles and react quickly to opportunities.

In this guide, you'll learn about the changes to modern work and how to approach your career as if it were a startup company using three entrepreneurship tactics. We’ll supplement Hoffman and Casnocha’s strategies with those of other business professionals and provide suggestions on how to apply their strategies to your career.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

In our unpredictable and competitive world, your ability to make good decisions has an exceptional impact on your success in life and work. Fortunately, you can become a skilled decision maker by using mental models—powerful thinking tools that equip you to cut through complexity and understand the world.

In this first volume of The Great Mental Models series, Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish and content strategist Rhiannon Beaubien discuss how and why to think with mental models. They present nine timeless, foundational mental models that will sharpen your thinking skills, and they explain how to develop your repertoire of models through a process of continuous learning.

In our guide to Volume 1, we present the nine models in three groups to show how they interrelate, and we suggest how you might use each model in daily life. We also expand on the history, applications, and real-world examples of the models.

In Personality Isn’t Permanent, organizational psychologist and entrepreneurial speaker Benjamin Hardy argues that, while most people see personality as fixed and essential to who they are, this is false and unhealthy. In reality, he explains, personality is highly changeable—and with the right approach, you can become whoever you want to be.

In this guide, we’ll explore Hardy’s arguments about commonly-held misconceptions about personality and what the truth about personality is. We’ll also discover how, with the right mindset and strategy, you can create the future you’d like to have and become who you want to be.

Along the way, our guide will explore both parallels and differences between Hardy’s ideas and those of other personal growth authors.

The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.

Most people think that happiness comes after success, and that success comes after hard work. But we’ve had the equation all wrong: Happiness isn’t the result of success—it’s the cause of it. In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor introduces this formula for success, based on research in neuroscience and the relatively new field of positive psychology. Achor offers insight as a leading expert on the connection between happiness and performance and the founder of a research and consulting firm that optimizes people’s achievement through positive psychology.

This book explains the benefits of happiness—from increased creativity to improved health—and how a positive mindset can change your personal and professional life. In addition, Achor provides strategies for adopting a positive mindset, remaining optimistic in the face of adversity, and raising your happiness baseline.