Luck is everywhere. It's in a $20 bill dropping out of someone's pocket and into someone else's future. It's in that job offer—the one they gave to the other "finalist." It’s in that odd bounce of a ball. It’s in those moments when the universe unfurls just so—the clouds breaking when you reach the mountaintop, or the cars colliding as you exited the crosswalk, not as you entered it. It’s in the moments that we barely miss, whether we realize we missed them or not. It’s in certain people, we swear. Maybe it is in us today—or it was in us, once. It's an admission that we—or they—didn't deserve… something. Could be good. Could be bad. But it especially wasn’t deserved when it happened again.

Or luck is nowhere. It's just what we call whatever confounds us—a figment we use to beat back our fears of the many things we don't understand about the world. It’s an easy answer to why, when there might be a better one. For example, as Barbara Blatchley describes in her delightful new book, What Are the Chances?, humans can be pretty bad at understanding randomness. We have a tendency to think of it as being somewhat evenly spaced out, when randomness is more like the night sky: It naturally contains streaks and structures—just not ones designed to repeat. Blatchley, a professor of psychology at Agnes Scott College, explores the psychology, neuroscience, and cultural history of luck. The text is full of examples of how easy it is to trick the human mind and its tendencies to seek causes and patterns. And if we’re so easily fooled, and we don't actually know what the chances were, can we honestly say something was lucky?

Wherever luck is, it has at least persisted in human consciousness through the ages—a shared religion of sorts, that even plenty of atheists place a little faith in. Most of us tend to believe in luck—even if, as she said one recent afternoon, while hoping the rain would hold off, Blatchley doesn’t. But whatever luck is—how could we get luckier? Blatchley has some ideas.

GQ: Before you started writing the book, did you consider yourself to be a lucky or an unlucky person?

Barbara Blatchley: To be honest, I hadn't really thought about it. I don't really believe in luck. I think lucky is a word we apply to situations where we can't figure out why things are happening, and it's comforting to be able to have a label for something. Once you've labeled it, you understand it better. But I think that what most people call luck is really just hard work.

For those of us who do believe in luck, even in a way that we have not necessarily thought deeply about, as a means of getting through the world: If I were to go about trying to build a good-luck practice, like one might build a meditation practice, what do you think I should do? How could I go about making myself luckier?

I think you should read Richard Wiseman's book. It's called The Luck Factor. I don't know if he's still doing this, but at one point he was teaching people how to be lucky. And what he did basically was have them keep a journal and pay attention to how they were paying attention to the world around them. He has four basic principles that distinguish people who see themselves as lucky from people who see themselves as unlucky or don't see themselves that way. He says that lucky people notice—pay attention to—the random things that happen around them. So if you see some flash of something on the ground, instead of ignoring it, going over to that thing that you saw on the ground and finding it's a $20 bill. That’s lucky. They also listen to their intuitions; they sort of go with their gut. They have expectations that they will be lucky; so if you see luck as a possibility for yourself, you're more likely to have that thing happen—and that's attention again. And then when bad things do happen to them, lucky people tend to learn from that experience and to adjust their expectations or their behavior for next time that situation rolls around again. So you can actually learn to be lucky.

Would you distinguish that attention from what you described as hard work?

Not necessarily. I'm a big fan of what Pasteur said—chance favors the prepared mind. I think that's the hard work: getting your mind prepared. And then when something does happen, you are perhaps more likely to notice it because you have that preparation behind you.

To you, what does that preparation look like?

There are things I do to try to become more attuned to what's going on. You mentioned meditation. I try to—daily. It doesn't always work, but I do try. Not only does it help with anxiety or with tension or—for example, prior to you calling, I was doing a little bit of meditating because this makes me a little nervous, I'm not gonna lie—but it does help with getting ready for something. And I think it also helps you have a clearer, calmer view of what's going on around you. And that helps if you want to notice more things in the world around you, and that’s what seems to me to be key.

You write about how considering oneself to be unlucky can become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-doubt can muck up our minds. So when we try to make decisions, that doubt increases the chances that we make a mistake, and that leads us to believe even more that we're incapable or unlucky. Do you have any sense of how, in particular, someone who considers themselves to be unlucky might be able to get themselves out of that mindset, out of that loop?

Gosh. Off the top of my head, no. I don't do clinical work, and so I tend to shy away from telling people how to fix problems. How would you go about doing that? I would say go talk to someone. I would imagine that if being feeling unlucky is making you feel depressed, then going in for counseling or something along those lines might help. From not-a-clinician's point of view, if you can find something that makes you feel happy, that makes you feel glad to be wherever you are—at the risk of sounding like Pollyanna—I think that can help you take more notice of the world, and that's what seems to me to be key.

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Recently, a friend told me that she thought I was cursed—for various reasons.

Cursed? Oh, dear.

It was in a loving way! And I was trying to find comfort in the idea that, in this random universe, getting a streak of rejections or bad news or what have you is actually natural. Streaks are a part of randomness. They are just a way of the world—and not the way that I am. Though I’m not sure I’ve quite found any comfort yet. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts!

I actually take a lot of comfort from the notion that random things happen in streaks. There are things that are going to be outside of your control. Good things will roll toward you; bad things will also. But whether you have control or not, good things are going to happen. I think you do the best work you can do and put it out there. Sometimes the streak is a bad streak and, despite the fact that you've done everything you could, you're not going to get what you want. However, in the long run, hard work is gonna pay off. So that's what I find comforting: that even the bad streak is eventually going to end. Just as the good streak will.

Do you think that your belief that hard work will eventually pay off is a form of faith? Not unlike the way that luck is a form of faith?

Yes. Yes I do. I was raised in the Midwest. I have solid Midwestern beliefs and values and all that other kind of stuff. One of them is the belief in hard work. That was my father, largely. You can’t hold it in your hand. But it’s there. Now maybe I'm just a cockeyed optimist. I don't know.

It does seem to relate to the definition of an optimist that you present in the book: someone who sees positive events as being because of the work that they did and negative events as being because of something else. 

Maltby and Day from the U.K. did a whole series of studies where they showed that executive function from the frontal lobe—which is paying attention and being able to switch from a losing response to a winning response—that kind of thinking was different in people who saw themselves as unlucky. But they didn't find that it was better in people who thought of themselves as lucky. So it's not like you have to come all the way around and say, “Well, instead of seeing myself as unlucky, now I see myself as lucky.” You just have to not expect a negative outcome for the behavior to change.

Going back to this idea of creating some sort of luckiness practice, do you think it's important to distinguish between how we feel about ourselves when going into a situation versus how we assess an event when looking back on it? It seemed to me like those might be two separable phenomena that we could take different approaches to.

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I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think you're right. I think the key that Wiseman was talking about in particular is, when you look back on it, if you see yourself as having control over an aspect of what happened—if it's not just the random winds of fate that determined what happened to you—if it's you as well—you can control that. You can change that and turn the situation around the next time you're in it.

It seems that humans generally are afraid of random things—things they can't really understand. I'm wondering if this research has actually made you more excited to uncover little bits of randomness in the world.

Yes. I like random stuff that kind of just happens out of the blue. I find it intriguing.

How rare do you think it is to see something that is truly random?

I think we see random things all the time. I think we often don't recognize them for what they are. I think because we have a brain that is designed to see patterns in things, when we come across something random, we tend to discount it and to ignore it. So it's kinda hard to ask, “How often do you come across something that you ignore?” 

You mention in the book that having a good luck charm can put people at ease, which can maybe help them be even more capable. And you mention that you have a pair of lucky shoes.

I do.

What kind of shoes are they?

They are black pumps with a useless and completely superfluous strap across the front. But I like them.

What's the story behind them?

My husband asked me one day, “How many black shoes does a woman need?” And I looked at him like he was from Mars and said, “As many as there are.” I came across these because I needed a pair of black shoes. I don't know if you've ever put a pair of heels on, but they are not particularly comfortable to walk in. These were, and that's how they became my lucky shoes. I needed them for a job interview, and they were great, and I got the job. So they became my lucky shoes.

Amazing. Do you remember another time you put them on hoping they might give you some luck, even though you don't really believe in luck?

I wore them to my wedding. We had an unusual wedding. I wore black; he wore white. And, yes, they were lucky.

I love that reversal of colors.

We were not your typical couple, I think. We'd been together for 32 years and then decided to get married. [Laughs] So it was backwards in a lot of ways. We thought, Why not go backwards with the color?

When was the wedding?

The wedding was 2013. My husband died in 2018.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Thank you. Me, too.

If you don’t want to talk about this, I’ll understand. But did ideas about luck enter your head at all after he died?

He and I had been working on this idea of writing about luck for a couple years before he died. He was my editor. I put it down when he died and didn't work on it at all for probably a year and a half. And then I picked it back up again. He died not because of anything that had to do with luck. He had cancer, and that's not luck; that's biology. So no, it didn't really change the way I thought about luck. I still think luck is hard work, and writing this book was hard work.

Well, thank you for this conversation. I hope the rain is going to hold off.

It's not. It's raining right now.

Oh, darn it.

It's not luck. It's just the weather.

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