[INTRO]
1957: the Oklahoma Sooners football team hit the cover of Sports Illustrated on a 47 game
win streak, and that week promptly lost to Notre Dame.
1988: Michael Spinks appears before his fight with Mike Tyson.
A week later, Tyson knocks him out in just 91 seconds.
2015: Two days before the Kentucky Wildcats hit the cover, they ruin their perfect season
with a loss to Wisconsin in the Final Four.
The notorious Sports Illustrated curse.
Athletes who grace the magazine’s cover seem to end up victims of particularly bad
luck.
There are hundreds of cases just like these.
The magazine conducted a study in 2002 and found that of all SI covers then printed,
913 featured a person or team who would later encounter misfortune.
Similar jinxes have followed the Heisman Trophy.
Campbell’s Chunky Soup.
Even the Madden Football video game series.
Since 1999, that game has featured a star NFL player on its cover, and nearly all have
suffered disappointment soon after.
What could explain this bizarre bad luck?
To understand that, first we have to figure out what luck *is*.
There’s no reason to think puppet masters are pulling our strings somewhere.
Luck isn’t a mystical force.
Improbable events are almost guaranteed to happen, if given enough opportunities.
But luck isn’t *just* the outcome of chance events.
In the 2000 NFL draft, the 199th overall pick looked more like an accountant than a football
player.
His 40 yard dash time was slower than most offensive lineman.
His vertical leap?
Third worst of any player.
Since then, that quarterback has scored 456 touchdowns and won 208 games.
His name?
Tom Brady.
By comparison, the six quarterbacks drafted before Brady started just 191 games and threw
just 246 touchdowns in their careers *combined*, despite all having better stats before the
draft.
This isn’t thanks to a mysterious force pulling successful people back to mediocrity.
It has a simple explanation.
“Regression to the mean.”
People, including athletes, tend to be awarded because of some exceptional performance: Super
Bowl wins, hitting streaks, doing well at work.
But exceptional performances, good or bad, don’t *always* accurately reflect ability.
Say a student takes the SATs 5, 8, 12 times.
Some of the scores are higher, some of the scores are lower, but the average reflects
their real ability.
Outcomes, in tests or in sports, are influenced by chance events no one can predict, like
getting a bad night’s sleep, or getting a test you know all the answers to.
People who do poorly are likely to do better next time.
Just like people who do exceptionally well tend to do worse the next time.
Everyone has an average ability, affected by chance events and after an exceptional
performance, probability tells us they’re more likely to regress toward their average.
There are exceptions, but we see this everywhere: Extraordinary statistics are… not the ordinary.
Just like Tom Brady’s ability wasn’t as bad as the pre-draft stats suggested, and
the players picked before him weren’t as *good* as their numbers made them seem.
Ok.
So let’s accept that unpredictable events are out of our control.
That randomness affects a lot of what we do.
Luck seems to be where chance and consciousness combine, like a filter that our brains apply
to the world’s randomness, making us draw conclusions where there aren’t any.
It turns out how we respond to chance *can* change our lives.
Maybe we can make our *own* luck.
You’re walking down a mountain trail.
A boulder suddenly falls in front of you.
Are you unlucky for being there at that moment, where a boulder almost killed you?
Or are you *lucky* that the boulder missed you?
Maybe luck is a state of mind.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman has researched hundreds people who call themselves lucky
or unlucky.
His work uncovered 4 principles of luck: Lucky people tend to notice and act on chance
opportunities, by being generally relaxed and open to new experiences.
Lucky people make decisions based on gut feelings, which is a fancy way to say they respond to
the unconscious processes underneath so many of our actions
Lucky people’s attitudes transform bad luck into good.
You’re not unlucky for being near a falling boulder, you’re lucky it missed you.
Lucky people *expect* good things to happen to them.
Let’s say, for some reason, you go to a human fortune cookie, I mean palm reader.
They tell you you’re about to meet someone special.
So you leave happy, and confident, you smile and go out more.
Going out more, you meet more people, and by chance, one of them is particularly nice.
They didn’t see your future.
They helped create it.
A self-fulfilling prophecy we call “good luck”.
Wiseman’s research showed that when people practiced these principles, they really could
turn their luck around.
Chance still acted on their lives the same it always had, but when that chance combined
with their new way of seeing the world, suddenly they were thinking and acting like lucky people.
And if that mindset becomes your new normal… what’s the worst that could happen?
Stay curious