It's Good to Be Lucky

How often do you think about luck? It’s been living rent‑free in my head since I read about that plane crash last Thursday.

On Thursday, June 12th, Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, bound for London Gatwick. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner slammed into a medical college hostel during lunch hour, killing 241 of the 242 people on board, the deadliest aviation disaster in over a decade.

Only one man walked away.

Viswashkumar Ramesh, seated in 11A, found himself pulled from wreckage that should have been his tomb. "There were bodies all around me," he said. "Pieces of the plane everywhere. Someone pulled me out and put me in an ambulance." When the emergency door broke on impact, he saw space and simply walked out.

He survived what usually kills everyone.

But this strange story doesn’t end there.

Just hours after the crash made headlines, Indian billionaire Sunjay Kapur posted a heartfelt tribute on social media: "Terrible news of the tragic Air India crash in Ahmedabad. My thoughts and prayers are with all the families affected."

A few hours later, during a polo match in Windsor, England, he swallowed a bee, triggering anaphylactic shock that stopped his heart. He died.

Two men.
One survives the worst plane crash in decades.
One dies from a bee that flies into his mouth a few hours later after paying his respects to the victims

Call it luck, fate, Providence, or whatever. Sometimes it’s just sitting in 11A. Or opening your mouth at the wrong time. Luck remains the most under‑examined variable in the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure.

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The Most Important Question You Never Ask Yourself

Do you consider yourself a lucky person?

Most people don’t. Not because they believe they’re cursed, but because we're bombarded with curated highlight reels on Instagram, stories of overnight successes, images of people living seemingly charmed lives. Against this backdrop of manufactured perfection, our own existence feels ordinary. Unremarkable. We might not think we're unlucky, exactly, but lucky? No.

This mindset is costly. Whether you think you're lucky is an important factor in actually becoming lucky, which sounds like self-help bullshit but happens to be real.

And let’s be honest. You are lucky. Extraordinarily so. We forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event of monstrous proportions. The odds of your specific existence are so astronomically small they approach impossibility. You are the result of an unbroken chain of survival, reproduction, and chance stretching back millions of years. Every ancestor had to survive long enough to reproduce. Every genetic combination had to align just right. but nobody talks about that because it doesn't fit the contemporary narrative of success.

Testing Your Luck

The Psychologist Richard Wiseman famously designed a test on how much of a benefit thinking yourself as lucky is to you. He gathered people who considered themselves either "lucky" or "unlucky" based on a simple questionnaire, then sent each participant to a coffee shop to meet a researcher.

The setup was simple, on the sidewalk leading to the coffee shop, researchers placed money on the ground. Inside, they planted a friendly actor instructed to strike up conversations with anyone who engaged.

Lucky people noticed the money and picked it up. They struck up conversations with the stranger, sometimes discovering fake job opportunities through the interaction. Unlucky people walked right past the money without seeing it and sat alone quietly, missing both the cash and the connection.

In another experiment, participants received newspapers with a large message inside: "Tell the experimenter you saw this and win £250." Lucky people spotted it. Unlucky people, focused on their assigned task of counting photographs, missed the obvious prize hiding in plain sight.

Anxiety Kills Luck‑Spotting

Thinking you're lucky makes you more attentive to your surroundings. This openness creates more chances to spot opportunities that were always there. But what kills this attentiveness? Stress

Ancient cultures figured this out thousands of years ago. When Roman soldiers carried charms before battle or Greek athletes performed rituals before competition, they weren't appealing to supernatural forces, they were managing their attention.

Stress collapses your field of vision. When you're anxious, your mind naturally narrows its focus to potential threats or immediate concerns. You become less aware of your broader environment. Calm people see more.

Let’s take a look at law enforcement officers. Police officers operate under life-or-death pressure, making them ideal subjects for understanding what happens to perception when the stakes are highest.

In training scenarios designed to simulate real chaos, officers develop "extreme tunnel vision." During one drill, a trainee spent three minutes methodically clearing a building to catch a mock suspect while fluorescent orange paint rounds, designed to be impossible to miss, exploded against the concrete wall just inches from his head. He never saw them. Never heard them. His entire world had narrowed to the doorway in front of him.

There’s more. Researchers tested 52 officers, they had half complete an exhausting workout before responding to a staged crime scene. The exhausted officers overlooked visible bystanders, recalled fewer crucial details, and were significantly less accurate when later identifying suspects in lineups. Their bodies were in survival mode, hijacking attention away from everything except the primary threat.

If stress can make a trained professional invisible to bright orange paint exploding next to their head, what is your daily anxiety making you blind to? The same tunnel vision that makes cops miss obvious dangers makes everyone else miss obvious opportunities. The person at the coffee shop who wanted to start a conversation. The money on the sidewalk.

Two Types of Luck

Luck means two very different things.

The first is pure randomness: surviving a plane crash, winning the lottery, the circumstances of your birth. This is genuine chance, and there's nothing you can do about it except hope you're sitting in 11A instead of 11B.

But there's a second category that masquerades as luck, meeting your future spouse at a coffee shop, stumbling into a career-changing conversation, discovering a profitable business idea through a random hobby. These moments feel like chance, but they're actually the result of decisions, attention, and attitudes working beneath the surface.

This manufactured luck can be systematically increased.

In This Newsletter

You work hard? So does everyone else. I think a whole lot of people work very hard, with at least as much talent, and do not see results. Not highlighting luck is unhealthy.

Here are three additional strategies for increasing luck:

1) Maximize Luck Surface Area. Most people live in predictable loops—same routes, same conversations, same environments. Lucky people deliberately inject variability.Tinker: Barbell approach to projects

2) Use the Barbell Strategy and Tinker. Keep most of your life stable and secure, but dedicate a small portion to bold experiments, side projects, creative risks, reaching out to interesting people. Most attempts will fail, and that's fine. You're not trying to win every time.

3) Trust Your Lucky Hunches Lucky people consistently act on gut feelings about which events to attend, which people to talk to, which opportunities to pursue. Your unconscious mind processes thousands of subtle signals and compresses them into intuitive nudges.

Maximize Luck Surface Area

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