Happy Monday
One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
A psychologist named Richard Wiseman handed two groups of people the same newspaper and told them to count the photographs inside. The first group, people who described themselves as consistently lucky, finished in seconds. The second group, people who described themselves as consistently unlucky, took about two minutes. Same newspaper. Same task.
The reason was on page two. In huge print, taking up half the page, were the words “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Right next to it, in the same size, was a second message: “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The lucky people saw both messages almost immediately. The unlucky people flipped right past them because they were so focused on counting photographs that they never looked at anything else on the page.
Wiseman ran experiments like this for ten years at the University of Hertfordshire, studying over four hundred people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky. His conclusion, after a decade, was that the unlucky people weren’t actually unluckier. They were just too focused on the thing right in front of them to notice anything happening around it. The lucky people were more relaxed, more open, and they tended to see things that they weren’t specifically trying to find. What looked like luck from the outside was really just a different way of paying attention.
I sat down with John Morgan on the podcast this week. He founded Morgan & Morgan in 1988 and turned it into the largest personal injury law firm in the country. Over a thousand attorneys, six thousand employees, more than $2 billion a year in revenue, all fifty states. The episode is called Billionaire Lawyer Says He Shouldn’t Be Rich, and he means it. He genuinely believes a huge part of what happened to him was luck, and he’s suspicious of anyone who won’t admit the same. But the thing I kept noticing as he told the story is how much of what he calls luck looks a lot like what Wiseman found in his research. John started the firm because his brother was paralyzed in a lifeguarding accident and the family couldn’t get decent legal help, so none of the motivation was accidental. And the way he grew after that, the way he talks about noticing opportunities in markets that nobody else was paying attention to yet, he wasn’t getting lucky. He was reading the whole newspaper while everyone else was counting photographs.
Quote
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca
He wrote that as one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome, and he spent most of his later writing trying to explain to people that his fortune wasn’t random. Wiseman’s research, two thousand years later, is saying the same thing.
Question
When’s the last time you looked up from what you were doing long enough to notice something you weren’t looking for?
Listen
John Morgan: Billionaire Lawyer Says He Shouldn’t Be Rich. This is the conversation that’s been in my head all week. John started Morgan & Morgan after his brother’s accident, grew it into all fifty states, and spends over $400 million a year on advertising, which is more than most companies make in revenue. But what surprised me is how much of the conversation ended up being about the things that can’t be bought or planned for, the meetings that happened by accident, the timing that couldn’t have been engineered. He gives luck most of the credit, and I think that says more about how he sees the world than anything else in the interview.
Read
The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman. This is the book the newspaper experiment comes from. Wiseman spent ten years studying four hundred people and came away with something I didn’t expect, which is that you can teach yourself to be luckier by changing a few small things about how you move through your day. It’s not the usual self-help thing. It’s a psychologist showing you the data on why some people keep stumbling into opportunities and other people keep walking past them, and the gap between those two groups is a lot smaller than you’d think.
If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast, and connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.
— Scott