Years ago, a Type A (to the 1000th power) friend who spent his career as a futures trader in the pit of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange stopped in the middle of a crowded mall and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Elrod, you’ve got a golden horseshoe shoved up your ass!”

Shoppers stopped and stared. I was so embarrassed, but he was right. I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Last week, another great friend of over thirty years (the one who manages my money from across the Atlantic) told me on a video call that he had asked his life coach how to get a horseshoe of his own. Her answer: no person is luckier than another.

My face stayed contemplative. Deep inside, her answer rang false.

So as usual, this ever-curious person started researching. It seems the coach and I are both right, because we are talking about different kinds of luck. There are at least three.

The luck of the draw

Where you were born, when, and to whom. The economist Branko Milanovic estimates that more than half of a person’s lifetime income is explained by country of birth alone.

I started in a trailer in the Appalachians, and for decades I told myself I was a self-made man. Bullshit. In the early 1980s, the doors stood wide open for a white, heterosexual American male with a conservative religious pedigree. Nobody earns this kind of luck, and nobody can create it.

The roll of the dice

Random events. The economist Robert Frank and the physicist Alessandro Pluchino both found that among talented, hardworking people, the biggest winners are usually the ones who also caught a random break. Daniel Kahneman reduced it to a formula: success equals talent plus luck, and great success equals a little more talent plus a lot of luck.

Here the life coach has a point. The dice play no favorites.

The luck you make

Here is where I question her assumption.

The psychologist Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying hundreds of people who called themselves lucky or unlucky. In his most famous experiment, he handed them a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. On page two, a half-page ad announced in huge type: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

The lucky people saw it. The “unlucky” people, tense and narrowly focused on counting, went right past it.

Wiseman found that lucky people do four things.

• They create, notice, and don’t pass up chance opportunities.
• They listen to their hunches.
• They expect good fortune.
• They turn bad luck into good.

When he taught these four habits to “unlucky” people, about 80 percent of them reported getting luckier.

Pasteur said it a century and a half earlier: chance favors the prepared mind.

First, the crashes

Before you decide to shove the horseshoe up to my throat, hear what the horseshoe failed to prevent.

In 2006, I walked away from a thirty-year career at its peak. A horrific divorce followed. There was a stretch when I was alone and homeless, taken in by the very people my church had taught me to fear. My new wife almost died of a mysterious disease.

And my two daughters have ghosted me for the past fifteen years. I have three (or maybe four) grandchildren I have never been allowed to meet despite my pleas for forgiveness and reconciliation.

No horseshoe softens the silence of your own children.

So when I say I’m lucky, understand that memory is a flattering editor. Lucky people remember the wins and retell the crashes as setups for the comeback. Part of my horseshoe is the way I tell the story. Wiseman would say that is the whole point.

My life, laid over the list

The herald. A psychiatrist once told me I am wired as a herald, a man who announces, connects, and talks to everyone. For eighteen years, I ran a conference that put me in a room with thousands of people who could open doors. Some call this “luck surface area.” Mine was enormous. Luck needs somewhere to land.

The sensitivity. All my life, I’ve been told I’m too sensitive. That sensitivity, along with a habit of listening well, is the newspaper experiment. While everyone else counts photographs, I see the ad on page two.

The stubborn courage. Hunches are worthless until you act on them. Creating a search engine years before Google was a hunch. Leaving the pulpit was a hunch. Leaving America and moving to Barcelona at 65 was a hunch. All of it looked insane to “sensible”people. All of it helped enhance my life.

The upgrades. Gina shakes her head at how often the better room, the better table, and the better seat come my way. Wiseman explains it. People who expect good things ask, smile, and engage (and the “gate” agent is a human being who responds to all three).

The reframing. In 2009, I entered a much-publicized Dream Job contest as a wine representative in Sonoma County, CA, and failed to make the top ten. It stung. Within days, I wrote on my blog that the attempt had multiplied my following, and that my next dream, a controversial book, was already being shopped to publishers. Wiseman’s fourth principle, almost word for word, years before I read him.

So, to my friend

You can’t get the first kind of luck. It was handed out at birth, and those of us who got a big helping owe the world some gratitude and some door-holding for everyone who got less.

You can’t control the second kind either.

The third kind is yours for the taking. Talk to more strangers. Loosen your grip. Trust the hunch. Expect the upgrade. And when the bad break comes, ask what it makes possible.

One more thing. Our first December in Barcelona, Gina and I sat in the Gran Teatre del Liceu for a Christmas performance, and I wept as the conductor raised his baton. Later I read the theatre’s own history, which describes two thousand people breathing as one “in the embrace of the Liceu’s golden horseshoe.”

A golden horseshoe. In my new home. With my seat location memorized so I would never forget it.

Lucky bastard.