The Wave of Fortune: Zeland on Luck, Streaks and Good News

The wave of fortune is Vadim Zeland’s name for a run of good luck. In Reality Transurfing he describes it as a set of favourable circumstances, personal to each person, that you can join or lose. Unlike the group structures he calls pendulums, the wave asks nothing from you. Zeland says you stay on it by holding the good mood that a first stroke of luck creates, and you fall off it by letting irritation take hold.

This page sets out what Zeland claimed, why the idea feels true, and what research on streaks, luck and attention shows. It explains the idea and leaves any practice of it to coaching.

What is the wave of fortune?

Zeland introduces the wave in the chapter after his account of pendulums, and he uses it to answer a question he set the reader there: which pendulums are good for you? His answer is none. Every group structure, from a beach volleyball club to a criminal gang, feeds on the attention and energy of its members. They differ only in how much harm they do.

The wave of fortune is his one exception. In his model of the alternatives space, every possible version of your life already exists, and some run like veins of gold through the rest. When something good happens and it lifts your spirits, he says, you can slide along that vein to neighbouring lines where more good things are waiting. When a first piece of luck is followed by a bad run, a destructive pendulum has hooked you and pulled you off it.

He adds that the wave doesn’t move at all. The better lines stay where they are, and the impression of a wave arriving and leaving comes from you moving on and off them. Like the sea, he says, the wave doesn’t care whether you ride it. It carries a tired swimmer to shore if the swimmer lets it, and passes by if not.

How is the wave of fortune different from a pendulum?

A pendulum, in Zeland’s account, needs you. It provokes you, captures your attention and grows on the energy you give it. The wave needs nothing. It’s a temporary formation that feeds on no one, so in time it fades, the way a wave breaks on a beach.

That gives his advice a simple shape. The work isn’t to chase luck. It’s to stop being dragged away from it. Most of the chapter is about the habit that does the dragging: reacting to small annoyances, chewing over bad news and letting a grumbling inner voice run unchecked. He returns to the theme later in the book as the law of bad luck.

What is the boomerang in Transurfing?

Zeland’s second image is the boomerang. Your thoughts, he says, come back to you in kind. His example is a home you hate. If you spend every day telling yourself how sick you are of the place, he argues, the dissatisfaction will follow you into the next one: a leaking tap, peeling paint and difficult neighbours will appear in the new house to match your mood. The address changes and the person living there doesn’t.

He extends the idea to what you send out. It isn’t enough, he writes, to refuse incoming negativity. If you shout at someone, he says, something will go wrong for you soon after. He invites readers to check it for themselves.

Strip out the energy language and two observations are left. The first is about adaptation. People who move to a bigger home usually feel better about their housing and no better about their lives, a pattern Nakazato, Schimmack and Oishi found in German household data in 2011. Psychologists call the wider pattern hedonic adaptation: we get used to improvements faster than we expect. Zeland’s homeowner wouldn’t be cursed by the old house. They’d be the same person in a nicer kitchen.

The second is about attention. Once you’re irritated you notice more irritants, remember them better and read ambiguous events as hostile. Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner found that angry people judge risks as smaller and take more of them. That’s a good reason to think a bad temper makes a bad day worse. It doesn’t need a boomerang.

Why does Zeland say to hold on to good news?

The most practical part of the chapter is about news. Good news, Zeland observes, is forgotten quickly because it poses no threat, while bad news gets turned over for days. He treats a piece of good news as a rope thrown from a better life line, and he tells readers to hold on to it: discuss it, think it over, expect more.

This part matches the research better than anything else in the chapter. Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed the evidence in 2001 under the title “Bad is stronger than good”. Bad events, feedback and information carry more weight in memory and mood than good ones of the same size. Shelly Gable and colleagues found in 2004 that people who tell others about good things that happened to them, which psychologists call capitalisation, feel better than the event alone would explain, especially when the listener responds with real interest. Fred Bryant’s work on savouring points the same way. Dwelling on what goes well is a skill, and it changes how good the good things feel.

Zeland goes too far in one direction. He tells readers to close themselves off to bad news entirely. Applied to your own grievances, that’s a fair warning against rumination, which Susan Nolen-Hoeksema linked to depression and anxiety. Applied to other people’s suffering, or to news you need in order to act, it becomes indifference, and this site doesn’t recommend it. Maxwell Maltz ran into the same problem in his habit of happiness chapter: the useful part is separating facts from your opinion of them, and the harmful part is ignoring facts you could act on.

Do lucky rituals work?

The chapter ends with what Zeland calls magic rituals. Market traders sometimes give the first customer of the day a big discount, or brush the first banknote they take across their goods. Zeland says outright that the ritual itself has no power. It works, he argues, because it gives the trader real hope for the day, and the form of the ritual doesn’t matter, only the belief it produces. He then adds that buyers are caught up by the trader’s thought energy, which is where the claim leaves evidence behind.

The first half has some support. Expectations shape behaviour, and behaviour shapes how other people respond. In a 1977 study by Mark Snyder, Elizabeth Tanke and Ellen Berscheid, men who believed they were talking on the phone to an attractive woman were warmer, and the women they spoke to became warmer in return, though neither side could see the other. A confident trader probably sells better for similar reasons.

The evidence on charms is thinner than it once looked. Lysann Damisch and colleagues reported in 2010 that people holding a “lucky” ball putted better at golf. Robert Calin-Jageman and Tracy Caldwell repeated the studies in 2014 and found no effect. B. F. Skinner had shown back in 1948 that pigeons fed at regular intervals, whatever they did, develop rituals of their own, repeating whatever they happened to be doing when food arrived. Rituals are easy to form and hard to test, which is why they last.

Are lucky streaks real?

Zeland describes a cascade of good luck as certain to follow if the first piece pleases you. Research on streaks suggests a more ordinary story.

Random sequences contain more runs than people expect. Toss a coin twenty times and a run of four or five heads is common. Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky argued in 1985 that the basketball “hot hand” was an illusion of this kind: players’ hit rates didn’t rise after a run of hits. In 2018 Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo found a subtle bias in that analysis, and once it was corrected a hot hand appeared. It was real and small. Gilovich has written more widely about the clustering illusion, our habit of seeing patterns in random data, as one of the main ways we come to believe things that aren’t so.

So a streak can be partly real, partly chance and partly memory. You notice the good days that follow a good morning and forget the ones that don’t. Linguist Arnold Zwicky called a cousin of this effect the frequency illusion: once something is on your mind you see it everywhere. The idea of synchronicity, meaningful coincidence, runs into the same problem.

Do some people really have more luck?

Here the research is closer to Zeland than you might expect. Richard Wiseman spent years studying people who described themselves as lucky or unlucky. In one test he asked people to count the photographs in a newspaper. A half-page message on page two read “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Self-described lucky people were more likely to spot it. The unlucky ones, more anxious and more focused on the task, tended to miss it.

Wiseman concluded that lucky people notice more chance opportunities, act on hunches more often, expect things to go well and recover from setbacks by looking for what they can salvage. Those are habits of attention and expectation. They sit close to what Zeland describes as staying open to the wave, without the life lines. Wiseman also reported that some of the habits could be learned.

What does the research say?

Claim	Who made it	What research shows
A good mood after a stroke of luck guarantees more luck	Zeland	Not supported. Streaks are mostly chance plus selective memory (Gilovich et al. 1985; Miller and Sanjurjo 2018)
Expressing irritation brings misfortune back	Zeland	Not supported as stated. Anger does increase risk-taking (Lerner and Keltner 2001)
Bad news is chewed over and good news forgotten	Zeland	Supported. Bad is stronger than good (Baumeister et al. 2001)
Holding on to and discussing good news improves life	Zeland	Partly supported. Sharing good news lifts mood (Gable et al. 2004)
Dissatisfaction follows you to a new home	Zeland	Consistent with hedonic adaptation (Nakazato et al. 2011)
Rituals work through the belief they produce	Zeland	Mixed. Expectancy effects are real; lucky-charm results didn’t replicate (Calin-Jageman and Caldwell 2014)
Lucky people differ in what they notice	Wiseman	Supported in his studies, which rely partly on self-report
Gratitude improves wellbeing	Many, including Zeland	Supported with small effects (Emmons and McCullough 2003; Davis et al. 2016)

Who should take care with this idea?

The wave of fortune is gentle as these ideas go, but two readings of it can hurt.

The first is self-blame. If good luck comes to those who stay positive, it’s a short step to deciding that your bad luck is your own fault for feeling bad. Grief, illness, job loss and money trouble aren’t punishments for a mood. If low mood or worry has settled in for weeks, that’s something to take to a doctor or licensed therapist rather than a reason to try harder at positivity.

The second is ignoring what needs attention. Closing yourself off to bad news is fine for gossip and doomscrolling. It’s harmful for symptoms, debts, safety concerns or a friend who needs help. Nothing on this page suggests ignoring medical advice, legal problems or warning signs.

How does the wave of fortune connect to identity?

Read without the energy model, Zeland’s chapter is about who does your noticing. The same week can be told as a string of disappointments or as a run of small wins, and the person telling it decides which version gets remembered and built on. That is the thread running through his Reality Transurfing books, and it’s where his ideas meet the rest of what this site covers about manifestation and the self you carry into each day. His mirror world chapters take the same thought further.

Changing that habit of noticing is slow work, done with feedback rather than willpower alone. That work happens in coaching.

Frequently asked questions

What is the wave of fortune in Reality Transurfing?

It's Vadim Zeland's name for a run of favourable circumstances personal to you. He describes it as a set of good life lines that, unlike a pendulum, asks nothing of you. You join it by staying in the good mood a first piece of luck creates, and you lose it by reacting with irritation.

Are lucky streaks real?

Mostly they are what randomness looks like. Random sequences produce more clusters than people expect. The basketball hot hand turned out to be a real but small effect once a statistical bias was corrected, which is far short of a wave carrying you along.

Does being negative attract bad luck?

There is no evidence that negative thoughts send out energy that brings misfortune back. Anger and rumination do narrow attention, raise risk-taking and make you remember bad events more, which can make a bad day worse and feel like proof.

What does Zeland mean by thoughts returning like a boomerang?

He argues that whatever you dwell on comes back to you in kind, so constant dissatisfaction with your home would follow you into a better one. Research on hedonic adaptation agrees that a new house rarely changes overall happiness, though for different reasons.

Do lucky rituals and charms work?

Zeland himself says the ritual has no power and the trader's belief does the work. Early studies suggested lucky charms raised confidence and performance, but later replications failed to find the effect.

Are some people really luckier than others?

Richard Wiseman's research found that people who call themselves lucky notice more chance opportunities and act on them more often. That's a difference in attention and openness, and some of it can be learned.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.