What Lucky People Do Differently, According to Science | Tina Seelig
6/11/202649 min
Luck is not a personality trait you either have or you don't. It is something you build, and science tells us there are specific, learnable skills behind why some people consistently seem to be in the right place at the right time while others walk right past the same opportunities.
Tina Seelig has spent over 25 years at Stanford teaching and studying exactly this. As Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program and a longtime faculty member at the Stanford d.school, she has watched thousands of students move through the world, and the differences between those who generate luck and those who don't are far more concrete and actionable than most people realize. Her new book is What I Wish I Knew About Luck: A Crash Course on Turning Aspirations into Achievements.
In this conversation, you will explore:
- What separates fortune from luck, and why that distinction changes everything about where you actually have agency in your life
- The ship, crew, and sail framework for understanding what it really takes to become luckier, and where most people skip a step
- Why your mental model of failure, whether it feels like a trampoline or a black hole, may be the single most powerful predictor of how much luck you create
- The hidden social behaviors that consistently show up in the luckiest people, from thank-you notes to a very specific way of asking for help
- Why luck is a long game, and the story of how behavior at a disastrous Costa Rica resort determined the outcome of a job interview fifteen years later
If you have ever looked at someone who seems consistently lucky and wondered what they are doing differently, this conversation will give you some clear answers.
You can find Tina at: LinkedIn | Episode Transcript
Next week, we are featuring one of our most talked-about conversations from the archive, Tj Power on the four brain chemicals that are quietly running your life and why the modern environment is throwing them out of balance in ways that make everything from motivation to genuine connection harder than it should be. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!
Check out our offerings & partners:
- Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
- Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsTina Seelig· Guest0:00
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.
Jonathan Fields· Host0:15
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?" [laughs] Here's what Tina Seelig 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's 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 wanna 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.
Speaker 31:09
[upbeat music] With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One Cafés are open seven days a week to assist