Luck is having more good days than bad

Recently I adjusted how I track my daily routines. I tweaked a few metrics that I use. I also set a daily minimum for gratitude.

I would think of three things every day for which I am grateful. They could be basic things such as the colorful autumn leaves. They could be around fun adventures with my wife and children. It could be something positive from work. It could be the upcoming weekend plans.

Whatever I could find I would write down. Every day. I would think up three more items to list. Sometimes I would repeat items.

I also started to keep track of my day and rate it from 1-10. I wanted to know if it was a good day or a bad day. It started with some good and some bad. But then over time it started to shift to many more good days than bad days.

I didn’t attribute it to gratitude initially. I thought it was coincidence. But then I started to find myself throughout the day spotting opportunities. I seemed to shift my attention towards the good in my day. I didn’t ignore the bad, but each day the good seemed to overwhelm the bad.

My life didn’t change. I didn’t get promoted. I didn’t lose weight. I didn’t buy a new car. I didn’t win the lottery. All I did was shift my mindset.

By changing my mindset through daily, minimal action, I created more positive outcomes. I would see risks in a new light. I could spot opportunities. I would see consequences of various tactics and know it wasn’t worth the risk.

It wasn’t that I was taking on more risk. Yet it seemed like I was luckier. It seemed the luck stemmed from the fact that I was being “better” at making decisions. I wasn’t relying on luck. Yet that led to an increase in lucky circumstances.

In How Luck Happens – Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh, the authors state, “There are good days and bad ones in any life, and you make luck by trying to have more of one than the other. Maybe doing what makes your heart sing is one way to become the statistic you want to be.”

But most people view luck from the extremes. They see extreme good luck for the lottery winner. They see extreme bad luck for the business owner that closes the business.

If we shift to viewing each day individually, we may have more control over each day. Sure, there will be bad days. That is unavoidable. But what about all those days that aren’t that bad. They might not be great, but can you do something to push them towards a good day?

If I learned anything from my little gratitude experiment, it is that I had a great deal of control how I felt about each day.

Many people do the opposite. They look for ways that life is unfair. And there are plenty of examples, so they keep finding them. They complain about what they don’t like in life. They listen to others who complain.

We may view those searching out the negative as unlucky. Or, we can see that they are doing it to themselves. They have more control than they realize. By watching the evening news, they engulf themselves in awful human circumstances.

By listening to the political critic, they are fine-tuning their ability to spot everything they dislike. They become so good at this tactic they can find something bad in anything. Every day becomes a search for the bad in life.

While the example of the person expressing gratitude and the person seeing the negative in life leads to a much greater experience of life, the tactics aren’t much different. They are small, simple things. And they are completely within your control.

If so much is within your control, what is your choice? Do you find every reason why something sucks? Or do you learn how to spot opportunities? Do you have good luck or bad luck? Maybe it is simply a reflection of your thoughts. Maybe that is within your control and you never realized it.