Leave the rabbits feet and fortune cookies to the gullible assholes. These four strategies for improving your luck circumvent serendipitous naysayers and inevitably put you in the right place at the right time. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Leave the rabbits feet and fortune cookies to the gullible assholes. These four strategies for improving your luck circumvent serendipitous naysayers and inevitably put you in the right place at the right time. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Negativity killed the cat
Your crying and self-deprecation isn’t helping anyone, especially yourself. So stop writing poetry in the cemetery, gather your wits, and allow the luck to takeover. A study by psychologist Richard Wiseman revealed those who described themselves as lucky had an overall positive outlook on life. When things went wrong, they would reiterate how much worse it could have been. This positive acceptance puts them in situations in which good things happen. Whether good things constitutes luck is up for interpretation, but what remains certain is that positive outlooks resulted in positive outcomes.   

Create opportunity
Luck is about being in the right place at the right time. We understand venturing from your daily routine is reserved for the type of bravery you express on your Match.com profile, but placing yourself in situations in which unexpected results might occur is key to improving your luck. Finding those situations doesn’t require dramatically changing your daily schedule, either. By taking time to walk in the park, wander a bookstore or even join a swinger’s club, you’ve positioned yourself for the unexpected to occur, greatly increasing your chances of being in the right place at the right time.

Goals are overrated
The key to luck is to forget everything your parents ever taught you. Those tedious, self-aggrandizements called goals only inhibit your chances for serendipitous success. Research shows when individuals become uber-fixated on a task, goal or fantasy they often neglect to observe the other opportunities around them. To better your chances of having a lucky experience, keep an open mind, reduce your grip on your goals, and take time to smell the flowers around you.

Trust your gut
That large mass protruding from your midsection is telling you to do more than just feed it another mustard-coated bratwurst. Listening to your gut provides you with the balls to make decisions confidently, venture into the unexpected more assuredly and approach the world in an open mind. Trusting your gut is the first step to growing as an individual. But enough Kumbaya-ing. Your luck will come when you finally overcome your shortcomings and confront your fears.