“Table’s open. You’re missing it.” M said it twice before I actually looked up from my phone last night, and by the time I did, a couple who’d been hovering by the railing for a good ten minutes had already clocked the same open spot on the beach bar’s low wall — the one stretch where you can actually see past the umbrellas instead of squinting through a forest of pool floats and hip-height plastic cups. We got there half a step ahead of them. I don’t think I even said thank you to M for the nudge. I was too busy congratulating myself on the table.
What I’d actually been looking at, head down, thumb scrolling, was the estimate our building’s management sent around for our share of the aluminosis reinforcement work — a number I’ve mentioned here before and won’t make you sit through again, except to say it hadn’t gotten any smaller since the last time I looked at it, and I’d opened that email for probably the fourth time that day like maybe it would read differently on a re-read. It never does. It’s the same number every time. And I was so deep in it that I nearly missed a genuinely good thing happening four feet away from me, in real time, for free.
It’s a good table, for the record — low wall, feet basically hanging over the sand, close enough to the water that you can hear it without having to shout over the music the bar plays too loud on weekends. We sat there for close to an hour, ordering the cheap wine because it’s the only thing we ever agree on, not really talking about anything that mattered, which after the last couple of weeks felt like its own kind of luxury. At one point M asked, again, what had me so deep in my phone that he’d had to say “table’s open” twice, and I just told him the truth, and he didn’t say anything clever about it — just reached over and turned my phone face-down on the wall between us, which is his version of the STOP technique I’m always going on about here, minus any of the actual steps.
That’s the part that got me later, lying in bed replaying a beach bar seating situation like it was a real event — which, yes, I’m aware is its own small chapter in the decision-fatigue book I could apparently write at this point. What got me wasn’t the table itself. It was how close I came to missing it entirely, because I was too busy scanning for the next bad number to notice the good thing sitting right there. That’s not a new idea to me, and I want to be straight about that instead of pretending it hit me out of nowhere. It’s the whole premise of one of my own books — the one about noticing luck instead of sitting around waiting for it. I’ve spent a genuinely embarrassing number of hours with this research already, back when I was writing it. There’s a real difference, though, between having typed the sentence “anxious people miss the opportunities right in front of them” and catching yourself doing exactly that, over a table, at a beach bar, four feet from where you’re sitting.
The Newspaper Study I Keep Coming Back To
This is the one piece of research from my own book I return to most, not because it’s new information to me, but because I keep re-noticing how good it actually is. British psychologist Richard Wiseman spent about a decade running real, controlled experiments on luck — not horoscopes, actual lab conditions — for a study that eventually became a book called “The Luck Factor.” He recruited around 400 people who described themselves as consistently lucky or consistently unlucky in life, and one of his cleanest experiments handed everyone in the study the same newspaper with one instruction: count the number of photographs inside it.
The self-described unlucky group took an average of about two minutes. The lucky group finished in a matter of seconds. The difference had nothing to do with counting speed. On the second page of that newspaper was a message printed in type over two inches high, taking up half the page, that read: stop counting, there are 43 photographs in this newspaper. Most of the unlucky group missed it entirely and kept right on counting. Halfway through the paper there was a second message, just as large, telling anyone who noticed it to stop and tell the experimenter — and win $250 on the spot. Same story. The lucky group tended to catch it. The unlucky group tended to keep counting photographs, heads down, dead set on finishing the task they’d been given, while a very large, very literal offer of free money sat in plain sight the entire time.
I know that study cold. I’ve quoted it many times. What I hadn’t done in a while, apparently, was let it sit next to my own actual behavior for more than a second. Because that’s basically what I did last night with a table.
How to Notice More Opportunities (According to People Who Actually Study This)
The mechanism behind all this isn’t mystical, which is exactly why I trust it. Wiseman’s data showed that people who consider themselves lucky tend to be more relaxed and more open — more likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger, more willing to say yes to a slightly unlikely thing, less locked into a single narrow goal at the expense of everything happening around it. Unlucky people, by his data, tended to be more anxious, and anxiety is a genuinely narrowing thing. It takes your attention and funnels it down to whatever feels like the threat, which is efficient if the threat is a tiger and useless if the threat is a spreadsheet, because it crowds out almost everything else your brain would otherwise register — including, apparently, a half-page ad offering you actual money.
There’s a related body of research out of Harvard, Ellen Langer’s work on mindfulness and attention, that lands on something similar from a different angle — that a lot of what we call luck is really just the difference between moving through your day on autopilot, scanning only for problems, versus staying loose enough to actually register what’s happening around you. None of this is a surprise to me professionally. What’s uncomfortable is how relevant it’s been to a woman who’s spent the better part of a year with her attention more or less welded to a spreadsheet of everything currently going wrong — the building, the sale, the number that doesn’t get smaller no matter how many times I refresh the email.
This Morning, a Coin, and Extremely Strong Opinions
This morning, on the walk to the pool, the 9-year-old spotted a coin on the sidewalk — just sitting there, half in a crack in the pavement, the kind of thing I’ve probably stepped over a hundred times without seeing it. She snatched it up and announced it was officially a lucky coin, and then a full debate broke out over whether you have to spit on it first for it to count, a rule she was apparently very confident about and my oldest was equally confident was “not a real thing, you’re thinking of something else.” I did not weigh in on the spitting question. I did, privately, clock the irony of the whole scene — three kids in swimsuits arguing about ritual superstition four sentences after I’d spent the walk over there thinking about a study that says the actual mechanism has nothing to do with spit or rituals at all, and everything to do with just looking down at the sidewalk in the first place.
I didn’t say any of that out loud. Nobody wants a lecture on cognitive psychology delivered poolside by their mother at 9 a.m., least of all a 9-year-old holding a coin like it’s the Hope Diamond. But it’s the distinction I actually care about, the one at the center of the whole “manifestation without the woo-woo” argument I make in one of my other books — you don’t need a ritual, a spit, a specific candle, or a phase of the moon for any of this to work. You need to be looking down at the sidewalk. That’s the entire trick, and it’s a far less glamorous trick than most manifestation content wants you to believe.
So I Tried Actually Doing It On Purpose
After the coin debate got resolved — spit, apparently, was ultimately deemed unnecessary but “not wrong to do if you want to” — I decided to spend the rest of the day actually trying to notice more instead of just writing about noticing more, which is a distinction I make with myself more often than I’d like to admit. I want to be honest that this wasn’t some tidy, life-altering experiment. It was one ordinary Monday where I tried to keep my head up a little more than usual.
Some of it worked. At the market, the woman at the produce stand who always throws in an extra fistful of something — today it was a bruised but perfectly good bunch of basil — actually got a real conversation out of me instead of my usual distracted “gracias” over my shoulder while I mentally re-ran the grocery total in my head. Turns out she’s got a granddaughter close in age to my youngest, and we talked about it for a solid two minutes while a line formed behind me that I would normally have felt obligated to hurry for. I didn’t rush it. Small thing. I noticed it anyway, on purpose, and it felt different than the version where I miss it entirely because I’m doing math about the basil.
I texted my friend S about the basil thing later, half expecting her to make fun of me for turning produce shopping into a research study, and instead she wrote back that she’d caught herself doing the opposite version just that morning — walking straight past a neighbor waving at her because she was too busy replaying an argument with her own kid from the night before. Neither of us solved anything by comparing notes. It just helped to hear that the missing part isn’t unique to me, that it’s apparently a pretty universal way for an overloaded brain to spend its attention, and that noticing it happening is at least a start, even when you can’t stop it every time.
Some of it did not work even a little. By mid-afternoon I was elbow-deep in laundry nobody asked me to sort by color, half-listening to a fight over whose turn it was on the good fan, and I missed — genuinely missed, didn’t even register until an hour later — that my oldest had tried to tell me something about a video she wanted to show me, twice, while I nodded and kept folding. That’s the honest part of this. Knowing the research doesn’t install some permanent upgrade. It’s not a setting I flip once and leave on. It’s something I have to keep choosing, over and over, probably for the rest of my life, and some days I choose it about as well as I choose anything else on four hours of decent sleep and a house full of people who all need something at the same time.
None of it solved the actual scary stuff, either, and I want to say that plainly instead of wrapping this up too neatly. The building is still the building. The apartment still doesn’t have an offer. Noticing a free basil and a decent conversation didn’t move either number. But I did go to bed last night — after the whole table thing, after I’d actually sat with how close I’d come to missing it — feeling like I’d caught something instead of just having survived another day of catching nothing at all. That’s a smaller win than “solved it.” I’ll still take it.
I say all this as someone who’s spent real years researching this stuff professionally, not as anyone’s therapist or financial advisor — just a woman reporting back on what she tried and whether it actually did anything, which is usually the most honest thing I can offer you here.
If any of this is landing for you, it’s basically the whole spine of Lucky People Notice More — the book where I actually go deep on the Wiseman research and a handful of others like it, minus any of the crystal-and-candle stuff that usually gets bundled in with “manifestation” content. It’s the book I keep pulling back off my own shelf on weeks like this one, when I catch myself scanning for problems instead of anything else.
As an Amazon Associate, Kind Shelf earns from qualifying purchases.
If this kind of thing is your speed, you might also like Some Days Aren’t Good Days, and Signs From the Universe That Help — a different angle on the same basic question of what you choose to pay attention to on a hard week.
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.
See you next time!
— L
Leave a Reply