Some guys seem to have all the luck. A perfect career, a perfect partner, a perfect life. When they’re not sitting next to a book publisher on a flight, they’re discovering a vintage Burberry trench in the thrift store around the corner from your apartment. It’s unbelievable. It’s annoying.

Their luck seems random—and these days, thanks to social media, it seems like everybody’s getting lucky but you. But if you’re sitting around waiting for luck to hit you like a benevolent lightning bolt, you’re thinking about it all wrong. Nobody’s just born #blessed.

That’s because luck isn’t something that happens to you; it’s something that happens because of you. At least that’s what Tina Seelig (a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford and best-selling author who's written seventeen books) would tell you. Luck is something you can create for yourself and learn to control, she says, which means that you can actually teach yourself to get luckier. Make a few tweaks to the way you approach opportunities that arise in your daily life and you too can become one of the savvy and brave people capable of making their own lucky breaks happen.

Here, she gives you the tools to do exactly that, and shares a few of the secrets that she’s used to unleash good fortune on her everyday life. We wish you luck in applying them to your own.

GQ: You’ve written that there is a “physics” to luck, since all of life is a matter of cause and effect. What do you mean by that?

Tina Seelig: We live in a world where every single choice you make has consequences. Many people don’t pay attention to the little things they do that have an enormous impact. If you don’t actually think about the consequences, you’re missing a huge opportunity—and they're often things you don’t even notice you missed. You see other people having opportunities that you don’t, and you can feel like, “Wow, how come everybody else has all the luck?” But if you look carefully there are all these little things they have done that end up essentially attracting luck their way.

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So what are those behaviors you can practice to attract luck?

One is showing appreciation. It doesn’t take very much time and yet it has a huge impact on people. Most people are not appropriately appreciative of what other people do for them, and they take it for granted. Especially when you’re a kid, or a young person, and people have been doing things for you your whole life, you just assume that’s the way the world works. Showing appreciation results in a tremendous outpouring of other opportunities.

The other is taking risks. Go up and say hello to somebody you don’t know. Try a sport you haven’t tried. Go somewhere you haven’t gone before. Each of these opens up the door to possibilities. Think about people who are well-known athletes. If they had never tried that sport, they never would have known that that was their gift.

The other thing that I talk about is embracing crazy ideas. There are so many things around us that on the surface look unusual or crazy, but if you’re willing to embrace them? It’s a little like improv, saying, “Yes, and…” Being able to look at everything that comes to you as a gift and embracing it, as opposed to reacting quickly with a no or with a negative response.

How do you make yourself more willing to open up to risk?

Tiny little experiments. One of my favorite concepts comes from my colleague Alberto Savoia [an Innovation Agitator Emeritus at Google, and Innovation Lecturer at Stanford], who actually has a book coming out about doing little tiny experiments. For example, if I get a chess board, I don’t immediately sign up for the biggest tournament in my neighborhood—I just play a game of chess. You don’t instantly sign up for the World Series the first time you pick up a baseball bat. The key is to do something little that gives you a little experience.