I’ve recently found myself revisiting an idea that has fascinated me for years: What if being “lucky” is actually a skill that can be learned? I’ve explored this from a few different angles. Spiritually, I’ve wondered about karma. Do the intentions, energy and actions we put into the world somehow influence the circumstances that eventually find their way back to us? Interestingly, the traditional concept of karma is deeper than the modern idea of “do something good and something lucky will happen.” In Buddhist philosophy, intention matters enormously. Karma literally relates to action, and our intentional actions are believed to produce consequences. Classical Indian philosophy similarly treats karma as a causal relationship between actions and their eventual “fruit.” Whether you accept that literally, metaphorically, or not at all, the concept raises an interesting question: Can the way we live actually change the amount of “luck” we encounter? Then there’s a completely different explanation. Maybe we manufacture luck simply by creating more opportunities for unlikely things to happen. Meet more people. Try more things. Ask more questions. Take intelligent risks. Enter more tournaments. Start more projects. Have conversations with strangers. Go places you normally wouldn’t go. Say YES a little more often. If an opportunity has only a small probability of occurring, sitting on the couch gives it almost no opportunity to find you. Put yourself into enough situations where something could happen, however, and suddenly you’ve increased your exposure to positive randomness. That isn't magic. It's probability. And there’s actually research surprisingly close to this idea. Christian Busch's research on serendipity describes it as something more than blind luck. His systematic review in the Journal of Management Studies identified three components: agency, surprise and value. In other words, something unexpected happens, but a person still has to recognize it and do something with it.