Documented: Wiseman's Luck Project at Hertfordshire, published as The Luck Factor (2003), recruited 400 self-identified lucky and unlucky participants. The newspaper experiment placed the 43-photographs announcement on page two and a win-250-dollars announcement midway; lucky participants spotted them, most unlucky participants did not. Personality data showed the lucky higher in extroversion and openness, half as neurotic; the four principles, maximizing chance opportunities, listening to intuition, positive expectations, resilient reframing, were then taught in luck school with reported improvement.
The folk note: Wiseman started as a stage magician, and the luck work is misdirection run backward, the unlucky person at the newspaper is the audience watching the wrong hand. His documented point about routines, the lucky vary their route to work, is the anti-magic: scramble the pattern and the world starts showing you its other pages.
The claim: luck training is filter training, the unlucky brain runs the reducing valve at full tightness, the lucky brain loosens the aperture and the world's anomalies, opportunities, and synchronicities, being always on, get through. The trap wing reads unluck as the valve's desired setting.
If luck is a perceptual skill, who is doing the seeing, and what else are the rest of us counting past?