There’s a man called Wayne who once walked straight past £50.

It wasn’t tucked away or hidden…it was just sitting there, right in front of him, on the pavement.

He didn’t see it, he just carried on walking.

This was back in 2011, on a Channel 4 series called Derren Brown: The Experiments. For those of you who aren’t as ancient as me, Derren Brown is a British illusionist and mind-reader who’s spent years making ordinary people do extraordinary things on television!

Derren had found a man who was utterly convinced he was unlucky. He claimed nothing good ever happened to him. He’d never won anything, never got the break and never had the luck others seemed to have.

So Derren decided to test it.

First, he had a scratch card posted straight to Wayne’s door. If Wayne had scratched it, he’d have won a real television. He binned it without a second glance.

Then came the £50 on the pavement. Wayne walked past. Didn’t clock it.

Then a fake street survey, giving away £20 to anyone who could answer six simple questions, all about things Wayne actually knew. Surprise surprise, he was “too busy” to stop.

Three separate chances. Three separate times he walked past them without even noticing they were there.

This is such a simple but startlingly clear example of “we make our own luck”. Because what the experiment actually showed wasn’t that Wayne was unlucky. It showed that he’d stopped keeping his eyes open for the opportunities right in front of him.

Look, obviously I’m not a trained psychologist, but I’d hazard a guess that Wayne had already decided the story of his life before any of this happened, and that story didn’t include him being the kind of person good things happen to. So he wasn’t looking. Not properly.

And when you’re not looking, you don’t see the £50 note at your feet, the scratch card in the post, or the man on the street handing out twenty-pound notes for six easy questions.

There’s a saying I keep coming back to (I can’t find who originally said it! Sorry): “Don’t be upset by the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do.”

Wayne wasn’t unlucky. He just didn’t see the opportunities in front of him.

People say this to me quite a lot, actually – ‘You’re so lucky”

I understand why it looks that way from the outside. Some of it genuinely was luck, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I didn’t choose the family I was born into. I didn’t choose to stumble into a job at Agora (where I learned about the business that I have now run for over 20 years) almost by accident. That bit was pure luck, and I had no control over it whatsoever.

But the rest of it? I had to put that in place myself, even when I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time.

I said yes to things that terrified me. I sent emails I was convinced would get no reply. I sat in rooms where I felt completely out of my depth, doing things I really didn’t want to do, feeling uncomfortable more often than I’d like to admit.

None of that felt like building luck while it was happening. It just felt like being a bit scared and doing it anyway.

That’s the bit people don’t see. They see the multi million pound house and the business now, years down the line, and it looks like luck landed on me. What they don’t see is the version of me who kept going, over and over, long before there was anything to show for it.

Actually, this makes me think of my daughter. She’s one of the luckiest people I know, hand on heart. She finds money on empty streets.

Shop staff will slip her gift-with-purchase things she’s not really entitled to, when she’s only bought some little thing, or she’ll come away with the best sample in the shop. The shop assistant will say, “Oh, I’ve got something out the back, we’re not really supposed to give these away, but I think you’d love it.” She gets extraordinary opportunities just from chatting to someone in a queue or smiling and being genuinely interested in everyone.

Horrible things have happened to her too. She’s had health issues that were not luck in any sense of the word. But none of that has knocked her off believing she’s a lucky person. If anything, she’s more sure of it than ever.

I reinforce that every chance I get. I tell her she’s lucky, again and again, because I want her to keep believing it. Because she is, and she deserves to carry that belief with her. I think believing it is at least half of what makes it true.

I think about this a lot with starting your own online business venture (creating your own online course is my favourite example of course 😉 , because I hear some version of “I’m just not the lucky one” or “it works for other people, not for me” fairly often.

I understand it, because I’ve thought about it myself plenty of times. But so often what’s actually happening is we’ve decided in advance that we’re not the type of person this works for, and so we don’t do the small, unglamorous thing in front of us. We don’t send the email. We don’t finish the outline. We don’t hit publish on the thing we’ve had sitting in drafts for three months.

And then, funnily enough, nothing happens. Which just confirms the story we’d already told ourselves. Round and round it goes.

I’ll be honest, I have been Wayne many many times. There have been ideas I’ve sat on for months because some part of me had decided they wouldn’t work before I’d even tried. It’s a horribly easy trap to fall into, and I don’t think it ever fully goes away. You just get a bit quicker at spotting it.

So if there’s something you’ve been putting off, not because you’ve tried it and it’s failed, but because you’ve quietly decided it’s not going to work before you’ve even started, that’s worth a moment of honesty with yourself this week. Is it that it won’t work? Or is it that you haven’t reached forward to pick it up yet?

I’ll leave you with that one.