40 People Share Things That Happened That Are So Rare, They Seem Nearly Impossible (New Pics)

But why is it that so many people seem to rely on luck? Recently, Bored Panda spoke about the psychology behind believing in Fate, as well as good and bad luck with Suzanne Degges-White, a Licensed Counselor, Professor, and Chair at the Department of Counseling and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University.

“As long as there have been humans, there has been a desire to imagine that somewhere some thing or some being or some force is helping direct us along our paths to a positive destination. Many people want to believe in luck because that gives us hope that one day maybe it will be 'our turn' to win the lottery, find true love, be at the right place at the right moment,” she told us.

According to Suzanne, what we believe tends to come true: “Life has a funny way of confirming our self-biases.”

"If we believe we're going to fail at something, we've already set ourselves up for failure. Believing that we carry bad luck around like a cloud gives us a reason not to do our best, not to try our hardest, and to make it 'okay' to fail. While we'd think that a strong belief in good luck would work totally in our favor, there are drawbacks to this belief, too," she explained to Bored Panda.

"When we don't take ownership of our good choices, our effective actions, or our hard work, we are selling ourselves short. It's true that sometimes circumstances can 'work in our favor,' or we can meet the right person at the right time, but we still need to recognize our own part in taking advantage of positive circumstances or setting things up so that we can succeed."

Rather than seeing ourselves as ‘victims’ of life or luck, it’s much more preferable to see that we have some control over our own lives.

“If we have an internal locus of control, we see ourselves as agentic in our world—we know that we can make things happen and we take ownership of both our good decisions and our poor decisions. But this lets us learn from our decisions—how to continue to do things that work out for us and how to avoid things that do not. An external locus of control sets us up to be 'victims' of life or luck," Suzanne told us.

"Research suggests that the people who have 'good luck' are just being more aware of their surroundings, making smart decisions based on current conditions, and actually 'believe' that good things will happen for them. That's a positive bias in our favor—we look for the good, so we're more likely to see it."