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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
opportunities for luck are ubiquitous. They're abundant. There's a prize in every room, and it's up to you to find it. And so if luck is like the wind, invisible but powerful, you need to build a sail to catch the winds of luck.
So if you're like me, you have probably watched someone land an opportunity that just seemed to come out of nowhere and thought, that person is so lucky. Followed by, why am I not that person? Here's what Tina Selig found after 25 years at Stanford, watching thousands of people move through the world and scientifically examining luck and how to create it.
The luckiest people are not simply more fortunate. They're doing specific invisible things that most people never notice. If you do not know what those things are, you cannot do them. Tina is a neuroscientist, executive director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford and author of What I Wish I Knew About Luck. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
And the place that I want to start with Tina is that word luck. And what most of us get wrong about it from the very beginning. We'll jump in there right after this short break. When most people hear the word luck and think of something that happens, I think often they think of something that either it happens to you or it doesn't. It's kind of not really in our control.
You've spent some 25 years or so at Stanford watching what actually makes people lucky or luckier than others. So especially in this context of control, what did you find? Take me into this.
Yes. Thank you so much for asking that. And I'm so delighted to be on this program. I've been teaching young people for over 25 years. And it's so fascinating to see those people who know how to see and seize the opportunities in their environment and those people who walk right by them. And of course, it's not appropriate for me to sort of point it out at the moment.
You know, you just missed that opportunity. It would be rude and inappropriate. But I decided to write this book to capture all the things I've learned over my long years about what makes those people luckier than others and the things that happen, especially behind the scenes that are not obvious.
Talk to me a little bit about the notion of control here. Chance. Because I think a lot of people hear the word luck and what they think is chance.
Well, I think there's something very, very important that we have to start out with. And that is some definitions, which people often confuse. There is a very big difference between fortune and luck. Fortune is the things that happen to you, and luck is what you control. And because we're in such... a dance with them and that dance is so close, we often conflate that.
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Chapter 2: What does Tina Seelig define as the difference between luck and fortune?
Where did you get this story? Because this is just a story. I mean, honestly, if you don't do well on an exam, are you really going to die? Right. No, right? If somebody doesn't call you back after a date, is it really the end of the world? No. But we so often think it is that we're not willing to go out and do it again. And so your friend, that's such an interesting thing.
I have a whole chapter in this book about resilience and about by fostering it, you get second and third and fourth and fifth chances. But if you don't, you get stuck and it's much less likely that you're going to be lucky.
I want to kind of double tap on part of what you just said here also because – so our approach to failure and also our capacity for resilience is not just a you have it or you don't have it type of thing. Like these are trainable skills or capacities. But you notice something, which is like –
where it may come from, which is, I'm really curious about this aspect of it because we kind of think like, you know, our approach just, this is where our life has been. This is what we've been told. It is what it is. Like if we fail, this is the way that our model is, you know? But these are sort of like models that get instilled often by friends, by family, by the culture around us.
They don't, they don't exist at birth. We learn these over time. And if that's true, then in theory, we could unlearn them and re and relearn a different model.
I agree. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day and he told me a story I thought was just so fascinating about his little daughter, who's not that little, maybe she's 12. And she had come home from school and she had biked home and he opened the door for her and she was crying. And he said, oh my gosh, what happened? She said, I got lost on my way home.
Now, there were lots of ways in which he could have responded. He could have said, oh, my gosh, that must have been so scary. I'll pick you up tomorrow. I don't want that to happen again. He said, wow, you figured it out. And I thought, how brilliant as a parent, right?
That little moment where he could have decided how he was going to respond when she was upset about failing or being disappointed or being frightened, that he basically empowered her and said, great, you figured it out. You'll figure out the next thing. And her confidence will be increased as a result of this.
Yeah, I love that. That feels like there's some overlap there also with Carol Dweck's early work on growth mindset. It's like when you bump up against the edge of something, do you look at it as, well, I've hit the edge of my capacity, or I've hit the edge of my, quote, talent? There's no opportunity to grow beyond this.
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Chapter 3: How can we build our 'ship' to create more luck?
Or I've just, okay, so this didn't go as planned, but it's an opportunity to explore what happened and do things differently or learn from it and keep expanding my potential.
I don't know it yet, right? It's the yet. I don't know it yet, but I'm on a journey to get better. I mean, honestly, it's so funny. I have my students create failure resumes, right? resumes of all their biggest scripts, personal, professional, academic, but it's not good enough to just write down where you failed. You have to write what you learned and what you're going to do differently.
And I have to tell you, when I was younger, when I was in my 20s, 30s, even 40s, I was the sort of person who would beat myself up again and again and again and again when I failed. I mean, I was so good at perseverating around the things I was disappointed about until I started doing this. And then it allowed me to move forward.
If I can actually process it like, okay, I spoke before thinking there and I'm kind of embarrassed. Next time I'm going to take a beat before I say something and I'm going to be much more prepared. And then I go, okay, tomorrow I get to do it differently. And it allows you to move forward without constantly revisiting your failures and realize that you just haven't learned it yet.
Yeah. So if part of our experience of, quote, being lucky relates to our model of failure or rejection and our ability to recover, that's one piece of the puzzle. You have a larger frame or model though around sort of like the general approach to luck. You use this metaphor of building a ship and hoisting a sail. Walk me through this.
Yes, yes. So this is something, I've been very fascinated by luck for a very, very, very long time. I grew up in a family where my father talked about luck a lot, and I questioned his understanding of what luck was. He sort of thought things just happened to him, and I watched as he moved through the world, and I realized, no, no, no, you are setting the stage for these lucky things.
incidents all the time. And so I realized that there are several things that you have to keep in mind. First of all, opportunities for luck are ubiquitous. They're abundant. There's a prize in every room and it's up to you to find it. And so if luck is like the wind, invisible but powerful, you need to build a sail to catch the winds of luck. So there are three pieces of the puzzle.
First is if you're going to build a sail, you need to start with your ship. And your ship is all the internal work that you need to do to set the stage for being lucky. The second is you need to recruit your crew. Most people are not lucky by themselves. There are other people who contribute to that success. And third, you hoist the sail.
And so I then unpack all the things you need to do to build your ship, to recruit your crew, and to hoist your sail.
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Chapter 4: What mental models shape our perception of failure?
But the students started continuing to frame and reframe all the possibilities. And there were the students who said, hey, listen, that $5 is actually a distraction. My skills are worth a lot more. And they started doing things using their skills like, okay, I'm going to set up a bike tire workshop. pressure measuring in the middle of campus and charge people a dollar to pump up their tires.
And they were extremely successful. The ones who said, hey, there are all of these restaurants in Palo Alto near campus that have long lines on Saturday night. I'm going to go make reservations and then sell them as the time comes up. So they just kept doing things where they were making several hundred dollars. And then the team that realized, hey, the $5 and that two hours were a distraction.
Their most valuable thing was the three-minute presentation time in class that they sold to a company that wanted to recruit those students for $650. And the lesson from this is that opportunities are actually abundant. We often just don't see them. And so the framing just has to be, you need to think about the frame you're using all the time.
Because, for example, let's imagine that you lose your job and you just keep looking for jobs that are exactly the same, but those jobs don't exist anymore.
Right.
well, what skills do you have that could be applied to something else? And so that reframe is empowering. And this happens every single day, whether you open your refrigerator and say, what can I do with what's in here? You know, I mean, it's just every single day we have an opportunity to think about how to use the resources we have to create something of greater value.
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. And the idea of your ability to reframe the moment that you're in, and this relates to the story that you're telling about yourself. But it goes beyond that, right? It's not just about the story that you tell. You're like, okay, so let me tell a different story. What you're really inviting us to do is widen our aperture. And it brings me back to...
Years ago, I stumbled upon this kind of fun study that Richard Wiseman did, where you've seen that all over the internet. If you've never heard of it, he gave a bunch of people a newspaper and said, count the number of photos. He asked people to identify whether they felt like they were lucky or unlucky.
The lucky people generally like did it in a couple of seconds and the unlucky, it took them a couple of minutes because on the inside front cover of the newspaper in giant block letters, it says there are 43 pictures here. Stop counting.
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Chapter 5: How do social behaviors contribute to creating luck?
One is talk to everybody. I mean, even if you're introverted, you can certainly say hello. So many of the most important people I've met in my life have been sitting next to me on an airplane. And you, you know, you just start a conversation, you have no idea where it's going to go. The other day, I was in New York, visiting my son and daughter in law, and they were just had a new baby.
And I was staying at a hotel nearby, got up in the morning to get a cup of tea at the little cafe in the hotel. And there I know this, I'm very tuned to the fact that you never know what opportunity is in that room. So there's a lovely young woman standing next to me in line and I just turned to her and I said, oh, what a beautiful dress.
And it was a beautiful dress that she had on and she said, oh, it's Rent the Runway. I said, oh, that's so interesting. Some of my former students tell me they use it and they really, really like it. So we ended up having a conversation. And then she said, oh, well, you have students. Where do you teach? And I said, I teach at Stanford. She said, oh, I went to Stanford Business School.
We ended up the conversation continued. By the time we finished, we were connected on LinkedIn. And who knows where that relationship will go at some point in the future. The fact is that would never have happened if I didn't just say hello. And some of my closest colleagues have resulted from having these very informal connections with someone. One of them is a woman.
I was standing in that line on getting onto an airplane, and I had a backpack that had a logo from a conference I had gone to. And she said, oh, are you, you know, did you go to that conference? I said, yeah. She said, oh, I was at that conference too. And we started talking in line. We literally switched our seats so that we could sit next to each other on the plane.
After talking in line, getting on, we talked for five hours. She's now a very, very close friend. And we've been collaborating on projects for the last 10 years. And that whole door would have remained closed if I hadn't just said hello.
In fact, I think one of the worst things, I mean, here we are wearing headphones, but seeing young people walking around campus with earbuds and headphones and looking at their phone, I look and say, wow, you have just, this is the anti-luck machine. If you are not looking people in the eye and just saying hello, you are missing huge opportunities to capture the luck in your environment.
I love that.
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Chapter 6: Why is resilience important for generating luck?
That's such an easy invitation also for anybody because we do, we move through so much of our lives with headphones on or earbuds and not realizing thing. Okay, so we're listening to something fun. Also, we're distracting ourselves from being bored. but not really realizing part of what we're saying yes to is isolating ourselves and really turning inward.
And even if there was somebody who was interesting who would maybe start a conversation, if they see something in your ears, they're not even going to bother.
Exactly, exactly. It's funny. I go around like, hello, hello. There's another thing that is, I think, a superpower of people who are lucky is Something you don't often see is they're extremely appreciative and they say thank you. Now, you're thinking, okay, that's so quaint, Tina, you're writing thank you notes.
But I am the thank you note queen and I can assure you, Jonathan, please be prepared for a thank you note later today, that showing appreciation, I mean, sincere appreciation when someone does something for you is a huge step in the direction of having more luck. Why is that? Anytime someone does something for you, they are taking time away for themselves or doing something for someone else.
It is a gift. And if you don't acknowledge that someone has done something for you, it is a, first of all, much less likely they're going to ask you or help you in the future. I know that I talk to people all the time who say this, especially when you're in a position where people are always asking you for things.
Those people who show appreciation for what you've done are more likely to have another favor in the future. In addition, there will be opportunities that surface. And they're going to think, hey, Jonathan, he was such a great guy. I'm going to give this opportunity to him. And so it's this hidden force field that happens when you show appreciation that those who don't do it don't realize.
Yeah. That lands so true to me. It's funny. I've had conversations with – I'm going to use a grumpy old phrase with the younger generations these days in thinking about the job world, which is for a lot of folks in their 20s right now, it's brutally, brutally hard. And a lot of people are applying all over the place.
And a couple of times I've been asked, should I be sending thank you notes or messages these days? Because it seems like nobody does that. It's not, quote, necessary. It's not part of the process anymore. Life just isn't that way anymore anymore. And grumpy old me rolls my eyes and I'm like, wait, you missed it.
And you're like, yeah, you know, you like that is that is certainly not the case. It's just not the case. And in fact, because people don't do it anymore, you are really going to stand out. And it does not have to be something fancy. I have a ritual and I really feel uncomfortable when I don't have time to do it. I get to the end of the day.
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Chapter 7: What practical steps can we take to widen our opportunities?
I don't remember this. But here's what happened. 15 years later, I'm in consideration for my current job. And it turns out that the person who was leading that trip was now on the interviewing team for me.
Mm-hmm.
Had I behaved badly 15 years earlier, there is no way I would have my job. And luck is a long game. I look at sometimes, I mean, yesterday, one of our students did something that was just not very respectful. And everybody on our team just looked at each other and like, why would you do that? You just burned bridges long into the future.
What happens in five years when I get a reference call for you? Someone says, oh, I understand that this was your student. Right? So you need to understand that the choices you make today determine the choices you will have in the future.
Yeah. And that you're seeding the potential for luck today that might actually manifest five, 10, 15 years down the road.
Exactly. Good or bad luck. Exactly. And so with you, and so I'm so aware, I mean, listen, I'm an old person now. I wish I knew this when I was younger, that every time I do something, it is part of how people see me. And that they're going to be making choices about how they engage with me in the future based on how I behave today.
Yeah, right. Because we're, I mean, the same way that you invited us to sort of like re-examine our own stories about ourselves and our own lives, every interaction that we have is shaping the story that somebody tells themselves about us.
Exactly, right? It's not just a story you tell about yourself. It's a story people are telling about you. I think that's really smart.
Yeah. So if somebody's joining us for this conversation, they're kind of nodding along and say, okay, this is interesting. You know, like I'm buying into this notion that luck may be more within my control than I really realize. And there are a series of real things that I can do, practical, regular things that I can do. They want to build a bigger sale using your language, right?
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