Make your own luck: the selling habits behind a lucky break

To make your own luck in sales, you give a yes more chances to reach you, then move fast when one shows up. Nobody controls which conversation turns into a deal. You do control how many conversations you have, who knows what you sell and whether the callback happens on the date you gave.

Think about the deals that felt lucky this year. A referral from a client you'd nearly forgotten. A prospect who said "not now" in March and messaged you in July. A stranger at a wedding who needed exactly what you sell. Each one felt like chance.

Look closer and there's usually something you did first. You looked after that client well, so they thought of you. You wrote down the July date. You told the stranger what you do instead of talking about the weather. The luck was real, and so was the groundwork that let it land on you and not on the rep down the road.

Both, and knowing that changes what you do.

In 2018, Pluchino, Biondo and Rapisarda built a simple computer model of careers in which each simulated person had a level of talent and randomness did the rest. Talent mattered up to a point, yet the most talented people almost never reached the top, because people of middling talent with more luck kept overtaking them.

Read that as a rule about volume. Chance picks which ticket wins. Effort decides how many tickets you hold. A rep who holds 40 real conversations a week has four times the draws of a rep who holds 10, with the same pitch and the same talent. You can't make any one call lucky, so put your week into the part you control: more conversations, kept track of.

Nobody owns the saying. Versions of it go back before 1900, according to Quote Investigator, and Gary Player's own golf book from 1962 credits fellow golfer Jerry Barber with "the harder I practice, the luckier I get". In 1955 the musical theatre star Ethel Merman put it the way sellers say it now: people make their own luck by putting out everything they've got.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, spent ten years studying 400 people, salespeople among them, who called themselves unusually lucky or unlucky. He wrote it up as The Luck Factor in Skeptical Inquirer in 2003.

His most quoted test used a newspaper. Lucky and unlucky volunteers were each asked to count the photographs inside, and the unlucky ones spent a couple of minutes at it while the lucky ones finished in seconds. Half of page two, in letters over two inches high, said there were 43 photographs in the paper and told them to stop. Most of the unlucky group missed it because their eyes were on the task in front of them.

Wiseman boiled his findings down to four principles. Here's what each one looks like when you sell:

He then ran what he called luck school. Volunteers spent a month on exercises built on those four principles and came back to fill in his questionnaires again. Eighty percent came back happier, more satisfied with their lives and luckier, Wiseman reports in the same Skeptical Inquirer article.

Jason Roberts, an entrepreneur and podcast co-host in Pasadena, came up with the phrase luck surface area. His rule: the more you do something you care about, and the more people you tell about it, the more luck finds you. He even wrote it as an equation, luck equals doing times telling.

Most sellers are strong on the doing and weak on the telling. You're good at the work, and only your current clients know it. Telling is where your surface area grows fastest:

• Tell each new client, in one sentence, what else you help with. Do it when they're happiest, right after the first result.
• Ask for one name after a good meeting. One name is easy to give, and a list feels like homework.
• Post one useful thing a week where your buyers already read, such as a short answer to a question three clients asked you this month.
• Go somewhere new once a month: a different trade event, an alumni group, a community your buyers belong to.
• Stay in touch with people who didn't buy. They still know what you do, and they know people.

Wiseman's lucky volunteers did the "somewhere new" part on purpose. One changed his route to work. Another picked a colour before each party and only talked to people wearing it, so he'd stop chatting to the same kind of person every time.

1. Take more draws, and count them

A draw is a real conversation where someone can say yes, no or later. A call that rings out is an attempt. Keep both counts, daily, because attempts feed conversations and conversations feed deals.

Book a calling block at the same time each morning and count what comes out of it. When the daily count sticks, add meetings booked per conversation, one of the ratios in the sales activity metrics guide. In ActivityTracker a call is one tap to log, so you count as you dial.

2. Follow up on the day you said

Most lucky timing is a diary date. A prospect says "try me after the school holidays". You write the date down before you hang up, and you call on that date. In the meantime their situation moved: a new budget, a new boss, a problem they didn't have in June. To them your call lands at exactly the right moment. To you it's today's list.

The rep who forgets never finds out what they missed. A sales follow-up process sets how many touches and how far apart. In ActivityTracker every client record carries a follow-up date, and a client's last-activity line turns red after two weeks with nothing logged, which is how a quiet lead gets your attention before it goes cold.

3. Write down what you heard

The newspaper test happens on sales calls all day. You're working through your questions, and you miss the line that mattered. "We're looking at this again after the merger." "My sister's moving too." "What happens if we start in January?"

After each conversation, write one line on anything that hints at timing, budget or a change in their life. On Friday, read the week's lines back. The openings you'd have walked past are sitting there, and so are the ones you heard and never acted on.

4. Expect a conversation, not a no

Wiseman's lucky volunteers expected good outcomes, and the expectation kept them going long enough to get them. The rep who expects a no dials five numbers and stops. The rep who expects a conversation keeps dialling until they've had one.

Judge the day by conversations held, because the nos come with the job and every one of them is part of how you reach the yes.

5. Turn a bad break into the next opening

Lost a deal to a budget freeze? Wiseman found that lucky people picture the worse version of a bad event, and that keeps their expectations up for the next one. In selling, a bad break usually leaves something useful behind if you ask for it before you hang up: when budgets reopen, so the date goes in your calendar, and who else they know with the same problem.

A no in March with a date on it is a call in September. When September comes, open with what's changed since March, which is how a good win-back message starts.

Jim Collins's research for the book Great by Choice compared companies that became great with similar companies that didn't. The great companies, Collins found, didn't get more good luck, less bad luck or better timing than the others. They got more out of the luck they had. His question for any business is what it does with the luck it gets.

For a seller, a break is a referral from your best client, an inbound lead from a big name or a stalled prospect who suddenly finds budget. Speed decides most of what you get from it. Readiness decides the rest:

1. Reply the same day. A warm referral is warmest on the day it arrives.
2. Know the person before you call: who sent them, what that client said, what they're likely to need.
3. Thank the person who referred them, then tell them how it went.
4. Move the admin to tomorrow. The break gets today.

A sales manager sees luck from both sides. One rep closes a big account through a referral. Another works hard and loses three deals to budget freezes. Judge both on what they controlled.

In a 1:1, look at three numbers before the result: conversations held, follow-ups done on the day promised and names asked for. Strong numbers and a weak month means bad luck, and that rep needs encouragement and a fresh look at the offer. A great month on thin numbers means good luck, and that rep needs to hear it, kindly, before next month shows them.

Keep those three numbers at the top of the one-on-one meeting template, then ask one question: "What opening did you hear this week that you haven't acted on yet?"

"Make your own luck" can slide into blame. Not everyone starts with a network, a warm market, a good year or a manager who opens doors. In the Pluchino model the most talented people almost never finished on top. Good habits get you more draws, and they can't fix a bad one.

So use it to sort, not to judge yourself. The market, the timing and who you happened to know at the start sit outside your control. Your dials, follow-ups, asks and notes sit inside it. Work the second list hard, and stop grading yourself on the first.

If a month of steady numbers still brings nothing, that's information. It points at the offer, the lead source or the market, and your notes show which. Take them to a manager or a mentor. A weekly reflection keeps the record that conversation needs.

Start today. Go back through the last month, write down every callback date anyone gave you and put each one on its day in your calendar. Tomorrow, book a calling block before email and count the conversations it produces. Write the one line after every call this week, then on Friday read them back, act on the best opening you find and ask one happy client for one name.

• Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor, Skeptical Inquirer, volume 27, number 3, May/June 2003 (article and download), read 28 October 2026
• Pluchino, Biondo and Rapisarda, Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure, arXiv 1802.07068, 2018 (abstract), read 28 October 2026
• Jason Roberts, How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area, Codus Operandi, read 28 October 2026
• Jim Collins, Return on Luck (a concept from Great by Choice), read 28 October 2026
• Quote Investigator, The Harder I Practice, the Luckier I Get, read 28 October 2026