March 16, 2018
Random bad stuff happens to people. You can recognize possibilities and grab at opportunities, you can work hard and proceed with passion and optimism, you can show unusual talent and even zig when others zag. But when illness strikes, a tragic accident occurs, or life takes any unexpected and unwelcome turn, you can be buffeted by forces you can’t control.
That’s the view I’ve always held of “bad luck,” until I spoke with my friend, Barnaby Marsh, Ph.D., an expert on risk taking who’s studied luck extensively. He offered a slightly different perspective on life’s unluckiest moments.
“Sometimes you need to have a bigger view to know what’s good luck or bad luck,” Marsh told me. He believes that what looks like terrible luck today could always turn out to be great luck tomorrow.
Luck—Good or Bad—Isn’t Fixed
Marsh’s perspective reminded me of the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a British woman named Helen who gets fired from her PR job one morning and rushes home. Going to the subway, she reaches the train just as the doors close in her face. The next train is delayed (more bad luck), so she leaves the station to hail a cab, and standing outside, she gets mugged (even more bad luck). With a slash on her head, she rushes to the hospital.
Not a lucky day, right? You might say that everything that could go wrong did. But then the movie backs up and shows another possibility for the day. In this case, the train doors are still open when Helen arrives and she gets on the train. Much better luck! Except when she arrives at her apartment, she finds her live‑in boyfriend in bed with another woman.
In the rest of the movie, both scenarios continue to unfold. And beneath the romantic plotting is the bigger message that we never quite know how life will play out. Good luck can turn into bad—and vice versa. We can’t always predict how events will unfold, and if parallel universes exist, we don’t yet have access to them. So all you can do is take the current event that has been handed to you and try to turn it into good luck rather than bad.
All you can do is take the current event that has been handed to you and try to turn it into good luck rather than bad.
I’ve met extraordinary people who live by this perspective. A few years ago, I traveled around the country giving talks about my book on gratitude, The Gratitude Diaries. I was struck by how many people reached out to tell me about bad luck they had experienced—an illness, a tragedy, a death in the family. Over and over I heard how the difficult circumstance had made them pause to be more grateful and appreciate the good things that happened every day.
One young woman came up to me before a talk with a warm smile and a cheerful demeanor—and told me that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer a year earlier.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, grabbing her hand in sympathy.
“Thanks. This should have been the worst year of my life, but there are so many moments where I feel very lucky.”
Her eyes were shining, and she didn’t let go of my hand. The treatments had been awful, she said, but she was now in remission. She went for a scan every two weeks and her sister always accompanied her, and they would go out for lunch and celebrate each time there was another good report. She also had a wonderful husband, always at her side.
“My children are only four and seven, and I want to be here for them. But right now I love them and we have fun every day—and I feel lucky for every moment we are together,” she said.
Wow. I felt my eyes filling with tears. Being diagnosed with ovarian cancer had to count as one of the unluckiest events that could strike a young mom. But she counted herself lucky that it brought happy times with her sister, a deeper connection to her husband, and memory‑making moments with her children.
I told her how much I admired her ability to find the bright side of a very dark story.
“It’s the only way to get through,” she said.
Luck, like gratitude, isn’t dependent on events. It’s what you do with the events and the perspective you take that matters.
Luck, like gratitude, isn’t dependent on events. It’s what you do with the events and the perspective you take that matters.
How to Visualize Good Luck
Marsh walked me through a visualization that you can do to shift your luck perspective. Recently at his Luck Lab—where he’s developing a new science of luck—he discussed “bad luck” with the renowned astrophysicist Piet Hut. Hut suggested that you can make good luck from bad moments by trying to step out of yourself and see the situation more broadly.
You can make good luck from bad moments by trying to step out of yourself and see the situation more broadly.
Barnaby compared it to walking alone in the woods. Picture this: The forest is thick all around you, so you can’t see anything, and maybe it’s scary. “But if you could pull back and have a big view from above, you’d feel differently. You’d see where you’ve come from and the many directions you can go. You wouldn’t feel stuck and abandoned in that one spot. Seeing more will give you a greater sense of control.”
The next time you hit a spell—or a season—of bad luck, try to imagine the positive outcomes that might yet be. Or, at least realize that they may be there even if you can’t imagine them. Bad luck isn’t always what it seems. Sometimes, it’s just the impetus you need to make the good luck happen.
Read next: What Being Broke For a Year Taught Me About True Abundance
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