Make Me Lucky
The original internet luck machine, rebuilt as a full 3D contraption. Still free. Still at least as effective as any other good luck charm.
Welcome to Make Me Lucky, the luckiest place on the internet, where you can find good fortune, prosperity, triumph and success at the touch of a button! Where previously you might have had to stay up all night to get lucky, results can now be achieved instantly.
For centuries, humans have carried lucky charms, crossed fingers, worn lucky socks, saluted magpies and made suspiciously specific bargains with the universe. Make Me Lucky is the modern version of all that, except instead of a rabbit's foot, it uses WebGL, questionable optimism, and one very pressable button. It will not bend reality, summon angels, cleanse your aura, fix your football team, or persuade your bank to stop being weird about card payments. What it will do is give you a tiny ritual: a moment to pause, smile, expect something good, and walk into the next thing with a little more confidence.
Lucky Charms
You can earn Lucky Charms by achieving certain goals: pressing the button a lucky number of times, coming back for more luck, or sharing the luck with your friends. Each Lucky Charm naturally increases your luckiness. Your charms are stored on your device, so your luck stays yours.
Does pressing a button really make you lucky?
You may wonder whether simply pressing a button can really make you lucky, but we guarantee it works at least as well as any other good luck charm, and we are quite sure that the more people who press the Make Me Lucky button, the more lucky things will happen to people who have pressed it.
That said, it rather depends on what you mean by lucky. If you mean “does this website secretly control probability?”, then no. Probably not. Legal have asked us to be very clear on that. But if you mean “can a tiny ritual make me feel more confident, more optimistic and more alert to opportunities?”, the answer turns out to be surprisingly less stupid.
Roald Amundsen said “Victory awaits him who has everything in order; luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.” Having everything in order certainly helped him win the race to the South Pole, even if the decidedly less lucky Robert Scott is better remembered now.
The actual science of luck
A 2010 study in Psychological Science, genuinely titled “Keep Your Fingers Crossed!”, found that activating good-luck superstitions measurably improved people's performance at a range of tasks. Not by magic: the lucky charms boosted confidence and persistence, and the results followed. Which is much less glamorous than magic, but considerably easier to host on a website.
Later research found that rituals make people feel luckier specifically when the outcome is uncertain, not when it's a sure thing. This checks out. Nobody rubs a rabbit's foot before successfully opening a packet of crisps. But before an interview, an exam, a first date, a big pitch or pressing “deploy”, even thoroughly sensible people start negotiating with the universe.
Psychologists have also found that people who believe in good luck carry more positive expectations into exactly those situations and, pleasingly, that feeling lucky and feeling unlucky are not just two ends of the same horseshoe. You can believe in lucky breaks without believing you are cursed, jinxed, or personally disliked by the vending machine. Believing good fortune has your name on it in glitter pen may be irrational, but irrational does not always mean useless.
Professor (and magician) Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire studied hundreds of people who considered themselves very lucky or very unlucky. He found that what people think, and the way they behave, has a big effect on their fortune: lucky people are simply much better at spotting opportunities and capitalising on them. His research distilled it into four principles anyone can use:
- Maximise chance opportunities: be open to new experiences and break your normal routine.
- Listen to your hunches. Gut instincts are usually right.
- Expect good fortune. Picture yourself being lucky before a big event. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Turn bad luck into good. Spend a moment each day remembering the things that went well.
Had Make Me Lucky existed when he did his research, we are pretty sure pressing the button would have made the list. No magic, no woo: just a delightful machine, a small ritual, and a cheerful nudge towards a slightly luckier state of mind: more open, more optimistic, and fractionally less likely to assume the universe has specifically singled you out for admin. If it helps, it's not because the charm is magic; it's because people are. (If you were looking for palm readings or magic potions, we cheerfully suggest keeping your money.)
Press the button. Accept the luck. Then go and do something useful with it.