WHY SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALL THE LUCK

A closer look at happy accidents and what causes some people and businesses to get the little breaks that make the big differences.

A blueprint for how to integrate luck into life by design, using findings from euroeconomics, pharmacology, architecture and social psychology to explain how we can take advantage of the research and make meaningful, surprising connections from the chaos that surrounds us.

WHY SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALL THE LUCK explains how we can take advantage of the research and make meaningful, surprising connections amidst the ever-entangling and unraveling miscellany that lands in our laps.
When journalist Karla Starr moved back to the US without a job when the Great Recession was in full swing, she needed some luck. More precisely, she needed to be crushed, drowned, and smothered by luck. So she started studying happy accidents and what causes some people and businesses to get the little breaks that make the big differences. The result is WHY SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALL THE LUCK.

Plenty of disciplines are independently studying chance occurrences, but Starr was looking for a way to integrate luck into life by design, so she uncovered studies and stories about how urban developers, computer programmers, and pharmaceutical companies build serendipity into the very architecture of their organizations. She interviewed neuroscientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs, dating coaches, and normal people who walked into life-changing jobs. She pored over stories and studies of why some scientists make far more lucky discoveries, how famous actors got their big breaks, and why it helps to be last if you’re an American Idol contestant but not if you’re a glass of wine or up for parole.
KARLA STARR writes about the science of success for Psychology Today, and her articles have appeared in Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and Popular Science.