My friend S said it to me over coffee a long time ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: “You’re just lucky lately.” I don’t even remember exactly what set her off — something about how the last few weeks kept working out for me in small ways, the girls’ schedule falling into place without me having to beg for exceptions, a parking spot showing up right when I needed one, that sort of thing. I said something noncommittal and changed the subject, but the word sat with me the rest of the day.
“Lucky” bugged me a little, honestly. Not because I don’t believe in luck — I do, in the sense that plenty happens to us that we didn’t earn and don’t control. But it bugged me because it made it sound like something that just falls on certain people, the way rain falls on some houses and not others. And I’ve had enough unlucky years — job loss, a health scare, a building with concrete problems — to know that’s not quite how it works either. So I did what I do now when something needles me: I went and read about it.
The Newspaper Experiment That Got Me
There’s an actual, real field of research on the psychology of luck, and the one detail that stuck with me came from a British psychologist named Richard Wiseman, who spent about ten years studying people who described themselves as either consistently lucky or consistently unlucky. In one experiment, he handed both groups a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside it. The unlucky people took about two minutes, carefully counting every one. The lucky people finished in seconds — because on the second page, in giant type taking up half the sheet, he’d planted a message that said “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The lucky people saw it. Most of the unlucky people were so locked onto the counting task that they missed it completely, some of them counting right past the message.
I read that standing in my kitchen with a cold cup of coffee and just sort of stared at the wall for a second. Not because it was some grand revelation, but because I could picture myself doing exactly that — so heads-down on the task in front of me that I’d miss the thing sitting right there in giant type. I didn’t need the rest of the research after that. I just wanted to see what happened if I looked up a little more than usual for a week.
What I Actually Noticed That Week
Tuesday, the 11-year-old informed me, with the particular eye-roll only an almost-tween can produce, that I was “not that cool, mom, just so you know.” This is new. Up until about a month ago I was still allowed to sing along in the car. Now apparently I embarrass her by existing near the school gate. M and I have privately decided that we remain, objectively, the coolest parents on the block, and no amount of preteen scorn is changing that assessment. But I noticed I had a choice in that moment — get a little hurt by it, which is what I’d have done a few months ago, or just laugh, because eleven is eleven, and that same kid asked me to check under her bed for spiders that same night. I laughed. It felt like the better use of the noticing.
Thursday was the hottest day we’ve had all summer, the kind where the fake wood floors feel warm underfoot by 10 a.m., so we packed up and went to the community pool in the afternoon. I counted — not on purpose, just because it was so noticeable — somewhere around fifty people in and around the water, and I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Not one. We’ve lived here long enough to know at least a dozen families by sight, and none of them were there, but fifty strangers were splashing around in what is very much our building’s pool. My working theory is that word has quietly gotten out that nobody actually checks the gate code, and half the block has decided our pool is now everyone’s pool. I didn’t confront anyone. I just noticed it, filed it away as one of those small, low-stakes mysteries of apartment living, and got in the water anyway. It was too hot to be territorial.
Saturday morning, the 7-year-old declared she was making the chocolate for dipping, no assistance needed, thank you very much, and somehow it actually worked — she stood on a stool stirring melted chocolate while I fried the dough, and we ate churros standing up in the kitchen because nobody wanted to wait for the table to clear. I’ll say this unscientifically: a good churro is doing the same job in my brain that a good hash brown does. Crisp outside, something soft going on inside, zero regrets. M has a running joke, half joke at this point since we’ve actually priced it out more than once, that if we ever land the house with room for everyone — including the chickens we keep talking about — the second dream is a tiny beachside spot serving nothing but American brunch. Pancakes, bacon, hash browns, coffee that doesn’t come in a thimble. That’s the whole menu. I think it would do very well here. I also think it will stay exactly where all our best ideas live, which is the kitchen at 9 a.m., completely unfunded.
Not Every Week Goes That Way
I don’t want to pretend the whole week landed on the lucky side of the ledger, because it didn’t. We’d had a buyer for our apartment — someone who already knew everything about the building’s reinforcement work, wasn’t put off by any of it, actually liked the math of it, since the place will be worth close to double once the renovation is finished. We were far enough along that I’d quietly started picturing furniture in a place with room for everyone. Then he just stopped answering. No call, no message, nothing. We’re back to where we started: still here, still counting down two years of construction, still no closer to a house with room for five people and chickens. Noticing more doesn’t fix that kind of thing. Some weeks you look up and there’s something small and good waiting. Some weeks you look up and someone’s gone quiet on the biggest decision you’ve made in years. Both are just what happens.
What Actually Put It in Perspective
And then last night reset my whole sense of scale on all of it. S — the same friend who called me lucky over coffee — ended up in the emergency room at 3 a.m. with a fever that spiked out of nowhere. She’s in the middle of a treatment right now where any infection is genuinely serious, not something you wait out until morning. She’s stable and home again as of this afternoon, and I’m not going to share more than that, because it’s her story to tell, not mine. But I spent this morning thinking about how small the pool mystery and the ghosted buyer and the preteen eye-rolls actually are next to that, and how none of the noticing-more-opportunities stuff means much if you don’t also notice the ordinary, boring, nothing-happened nights while you still have them.
I don’t think S is wrong that some weeks feel luckier than others, and I don’t think “notice more, get more” is a formula sturdy enough to hold up against a ghosted buyer or a 3 a.m. fever. But it was a useful shift anyway — noticing the eye-roll as funny instead of hurtful, noticing fifty strangers in the pool instead of scrolling past them, noticing that a completely ordinary Saturday morning with burnt sugar in the air and a proud seven-year-old was actually a really good morning. Some of what happens to us, we don’t get a say in. Some of it, it turns out, was there all along, waiting for me to look up.
I ended up writing a whole book about this after that newspaper study wouldn’t leave me alone — Lucky People Notice More. I didn’t crack the code on luck, I promise I didn’t, but it’s where all the research I kept reading at midnight instead of sleeping finally went.
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If any of this rabbit-holing sounds familiar, I’ve gone down a couple of similar ones before — the meditation-and-manifestation spiral that actually started Kind Shelf, and how we ended up here in the first place, if you want the longer backstory.
Thank you so much for spending ten minutes here with me today. If you think someone in your life could use a little story-time break, or if any of this resonated with you, I’d love it if you shared it with them.
— L
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