Luck is not a personality trait you either have or you don't. It is something you build, and science tells us there are specific, learnable skills behind why some people consistently seem to be in the right place at the right time while others walk right past the same opportunities.

Tina Seelig has spent over 25 years at Stanford teaching and studying exactly this. As Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program and a longtime faculty member at the Stanford d.school, she has watched thousands of students move through the world, and the differences between those who generate luck and those who don't are far more concrete and actionable than most people realize. Her new book is What I Wish I Knew About Luck: A Crash Course on Turning Aspirations into Achievements.

In this conversation, you will explore:

• What separates fortune from luck, and why that distinction changes everything about where you actually have agency in your life
• The ship, crew, and sail framework for understanding what it really takes to become luckier, and where most people skip a step
• Why your mental model of failure, whether it feels like a trampoline or a black hole, may be the single most powerful predictor of how much luck you create
• The hidden social behaviors that consistently show up in the luckiest people, from thank-you notes to a very specific way of asking for help
• Why luck is a long game, and the story of how behavior at a disastrous Costa Rica resort determined the outcome of a job interview fifteen years later

If you have ever looked at someone who seems consistently lucky and wondered what they are doing differently, this conversation will give you some clear answers.

You can find Tina at: LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

Next week, we are featuring one of our most talked-about conversations from the archive, Tj Power on the four brain chemicals that are quietly running your life and why the modern environment is throwing them out of balance in ways that make everything from motivation to genuine connection harder than it should be. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that hits in the middle of a full life.

Not because you are isolated. Because the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once. Your kids have left. A parent has died. A marriage needs new terms. A friendship has frayed. And the cultural rituals that once helped people move through moments like this are mostly gone.

Bruce Feiler has spent the last three years traveling to 26 countries, attending over 100 ceremonies, and interviewing hundreds of people to understand what happens when we stop gathering in intentional ways. He's a seven-time New York Times bestselling author and the creator of the LifeQuakes framework. His new book, A Time to Gather, makes the case that we are living through both a celebration recession and a ritual renaissance at the same time.

In this conversation, Bruce and Jonathan explore what it actually means to feel homesick in your own home, why the four traditional life rituals no longer match the lives most of us are actually living, and what it looks like to design a ritual from scratch when the ones you inherited don't fit.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why 5,000 Civil War soldiers were officially diagnosed as dying of homesickness, and what that history reveals about the longing you feel now
• The five building blocks of any ritual, from drawing the circle to creating a web of hope, and how to use them to mark a moment that matters
• Why Bruce calls this a celebration recession: what we stopped doing, when, and what's quietly replacing it
• The live ritual Bruce helps Jonathan design in real time, walking through every step from welcome to close
• Why rituals are not just for grief and weddings, and the new ceremonies people are creating for divorce, mastectomies, miscarriages, sobriety, and career endings

If you have ever felt the ground shift under you and not known how to steady yourself with the people you love most, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Bruce at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Stanford professor Tina Seelig to talk about something most of us have completely backwards: how luck actually works, and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight. If you have ever wondered why some people seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is going to change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here is something most of us have never been told: falling in love was never supposed to be easy, and the fact that it hasn't been isn't a character flaw. It's a design problem. Your biology may be working against you. Your cultural programming works against you. But, more than anything, the list you've been carrying around of what you want in a partner is almost certainly pointing you in the wrong direction.

Bela Gandhi is a dating coach and the founder of Smart Dating Academy, where she has helped thousands of people find lasting relationships. She was a longtime dating expert on Good Morning America and the Steve Harvey Show and built her methodology after realizing that love, like anything else worth doing, benefits from a system.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why 74% of third marriages end in divorce, and what that tells us about how most people approach finding a partner
• The "elevator people" exercise that reveals what you actually need in a relationship, and why it almost never matches your dream list
• How biology, attachment patterns, and cultural messaging conspire to make us fall for the wrong people, again and again
• What highly accomplished, independent women often get wrong in the dating world, and what to do about it instead
• Why attraction can grow rather than just appear, and how pacing changes everything

If you've been wondering whether love is still possible for you at this stage of life, Bela's answer is clear. She's seen too many people find it at 50, 60, and beyond to believe otherwise.

You can find Bela at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with seven-time New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler to talk about something most of us have felt but never quite had words for: the particular loneliness that arrives in the middle of a full life, when the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once, and the rituals that helped people move through moments like these for thousands of years have largely disappeared. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our offerings & partners:

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.