Have you ever thought about where luck comes from? Is it something completely outside of yourself? Or can you create your own luck? If you’ve ever wondered how to be lucky, consider this: you can manifest good fortune by believing you’re lucky, then sharing that belief with the world around you. Let me tell you how.

My father-in-law loves to share his latest learnings with us. The other day, on the way from D.C. to NYC, he spent three hours looking at YouTube videos on health, particularly on the importance of consuming nuts.

The rest of the week we received emails and texts filled with all sorts of tips about healthy eating and some of his top favorite healthy eating habits. 

Last week it was nuts. A few weeks before it was luck, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about luck ever since. He sent us an article on how luck is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Only the lucky are lucky. The article, in part, said that people who acknowledge luck and who shared this framing with others beget more of it.  In other words, if you want to be luckier, then believe in it, then tell people about it.  

luck truly takes place in the sharing.

So the lucky ones are great storytellers to themselves and those around them. If that’s the case, luck truly takes place in the sharing. And if that’s the case, we better own it cause gosh, darn it, I want me some of that.

When I was in high school, I liked to go around singing out loud. This not only made me a weirdo but incredibly happy. I’ve always been the kind of person who will announce they just farted. It’s a compulsion (the sharing not the farting) and one I’ve had to tame through the years.

See, if you walk around school singing or start listing your favorite kinds of nuts (like my father-in-law did) to people during dinner, you are bound to be met with a stare that I’m sure is the reserved for Saw films (if you haven’t seen this series, don’t. It’s just crazy insane and depressing).

And slowly, the sharing stops. I can’t quite pinpoint when the shift happened for me, and honestly, it doesn’t quite matter. What matters is that as time passed, I felt broken and discombobulated for sharing myself openly.

the lucky are the crazy people who dare go out there and sing their ideas out loud to the world.

And yet, it was in the moments that I was sharing myself that I felt the happiest; that I experienced the most amount of luck in my life.

I still remember the day I declared to my mother that I was going to win the bicycle being raffled in school. I was in middle school. The bike was a beautiful pink, white, and gray ride. I asked my mom to buy a couple of tickets and she obliged. And wouldn’t you know it, I won the bike.

Years later, I was living with my sister in NY (Ok, I was crashing on her couch after a bad breakup) when a thought struck me. I came home one and told my sister to get dressed because we were for sure going to win tickets to watch Lin Manuel Miranda’s first show–In the Heights. I was so sure of it. My sister didn’t ask any questions. We saw it as an adventure, and off we went. And wouldn’t you know it, we actually won the tickets to the show.

Now that I think about it—all these times I had someone who did not look at me weirdly. They loved me enough to indulge me in my sharing even if they thought it crazy at the time (and believe me, I’ve had my share of crazy, lucky times.)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about luck. Countless podcasts such as How I Built This, and Tim Ferris’s own, as well as a host of book and biographies on successful people (Thanks Richard Branson) have shown me that the world belongs to the lucky, and that the lucky are the crazy people who dare go out there and sing their ideas out loud to the world. Like my father in law does.

We’ve grown up thinking that luck is something you sit around and wait for. I don’t quite buy that anymore. Or rather, I’ve realized that my young self was right.

Luck is an active process. Something we practice, cultivate, and share daily.