The Luck You Keep Missing
On attention, attunement, and what happens when you finally learn to see.
"The world doesn't change. The eyes that see it do."
I spent most of my life glancing at clover patches.
Not obsessively. Just, the way you do something when it feels like it might mean something. A quick scan of the grass. A moment of wondering. And then moving on, empty-handed, half-convinced that four-leaf clovers were more myth than reality.
The probability, it turns out, is somewhere between one in five thousand and one in ten thousand. Rare, but not impossible.
I just never found one.
Until last year. On a lake in Switzerland. On our son’s first birthday. And then, suddenly, everywhere.
What Changed
The easy answer is the Baader-Meinhof effect. The frequency illusion. The well-documented psychological phenomenon that explains why, once you learn a new word, you hear it constantly, why pregnant women seem to suddenly notice other pregnant women, why the car you just bought appears on every street.
It’s not magic. It’s the brain doing what the brain always does: filtering reality according to what it has been told matters.
Before that day at the lake, our brains were looking for clovers, but not really seeing them. The search image wasn’t sharp enough. Four leaves among thousands of three. The signal too subtle for a mind that hadn’t yet confirmed this was worth finding.
And then Ronny found one. And something recalibrated.
Not luck. Attunement.
The clovers were always there. We changed.
The Twist I Didn’t Expect
When I started researching the probability of finding a four-leaf clover, I discovered something I hadn’t known before.
There are also five-leaf clovers. And six-leaf ones.
And almost immediately after learning this, we started finding those too.
This is the part that interests me most, psychologically. Because we didn’t just get better at finding what we were originally looking for. We expanded what we were willing to look for.
Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives searching for one very specific shape of luck. One version of the relationship, the opportunity, the moment that will finally feel right. And because the search image is so narrow, so predetermined, we walk past everything that doesn’t match it exactly.
The five-leaf clover was there the whole time.
We just weren’t looking for it.
On Tending, Not Just Finding
But here is where the story takes a turn I didn’t anticipate.
After that first find, Ronny brought one home, with a tiny root still attached. He put it in a glass of water. Many weeks have passed now. The root has developed quietly, without much intervention from us. Every morning, the leaves open. Every evening, they close.
We have a relationship with it now. A small, daily one. And it struck me, watching it one morning, that this is an entirely different relationship to luck than finding it.
Finding is a moment. A flash of attention, a sudden recalibration, and then it’s over.
Tending is something else. It’s the choice to fill the glass again. To not throw it away when it looks fragile. To trust that something small and improbable is worth caring for.
In psychology, we talk about locus of control, the degree to which we believe we have agency over our circumstances. People with a strong internal locus don’t believe they are inherently luckier than others. They believe that what they do with what they find matters.
Ronny didn’t just find a clover. He decided it was worth keeping. And it responded.
The Patch We Walked Past Every Day
And then, the patch.
On a walk we do almost every day, we found it. A stretch of ground full of four and five-leaf clovers. Dense with them. Quietly extraordinary, in a place we had passed dozens of times before without seeing.
That place was always there.
We were not.
This is what I keep returning to. Luck isn’t distributed randomly among the chosen few. It clusters, in places, in moments, in particular states of openness, and it waits. What changes isn’t the luck. What changes is our capacity to perceive it, our willingness to expand our definition of it, and our commitment to tending it once we find it.
What This Has to Do With You
I’m a psychologist. I work with people in transition, expats rebuilding identity in new countries, high-achievers navigating anxiety, women redefining themselves in midlife. And across all of these conversations, I notice a version of the same thing:
People who believe they are unlucky are often people who are using the wrong search image.
They are looking for luck in one specific shape, in one specific place, at one specific moment in life, and because it hasn’t appeared in exactly that form, they conclude it isn’t coming.
But sometimes the luck is the unexpected city that turned out to feel like home. The career pivot that didn’t look like success at first. The relationship that didn’t match the picture but turned out to be the one worth tending.
You’re not unlucky.
You might just be looking for the wrong shape.
Or you found something once, a moment of clarity, an opportunity, a connection, and let it sit without tending, until it quietly died.
Or you’ve been walking past the patch every single day.
A Few Questions Worth Sitting With
What have you been walking past?
What is your current “search image” for luck, for love, for meaning, and how fixed is it?
Is there something in your life right now that you found, but haven’t tended?
And, perhaps most importantly, what would it mean to expand your definition of what counts?
This piece is a companion to my latest YouTube video, where I tell the full story, the lake, the birthday, the clover in a glass of water, the patch on our daily walk. If you’d like to watch it, the link is below.
And if this resonated, I’d love to know. Have you ever found a four-leaf clover? Have you ever walked past something without seeing it, and then suddenly, there it was? Share with me in the comments.
My old man used to tell me I wouldn't know a good thing if it hit me in the head. I've never found a four leaf clover, but I always feel lucky to read your essays, and more recently, watch the videos. This one is a good reminder that maybe what I'm looking for doesn't always appear in the package I'd expect.