How Lucky Am I? — The Question That Started All of This.
By Jason Shelfer
Host of The Living Lucky® Podcast | LivingLucky.com
Four words.
That’s where everything you’re reading right now began. Not with a business plan or a podcast or a course or a journal. With four words written by hand in a rehab hospital in Colorado, on the first night a fifteen-year-old girl didn’t cry herself to sleep.
How lucky am I?
If you’ve been reading this blog series from the beginning, you know Jana’s story. If this is the first blog of ours you’ve read, let me tell you the part that matters most.
On May 23rd, 1990, Jana was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident in rural Kansas. She was 15 years old. She was transferred to Craig Hospital in Colorado — one of the country’s leading rehabilitation centers — and for weeks she cried herself to sleep every night. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way people grieve when they’re trying to be strong during the day and the night is the only place left to fall apart.
And then one day, in the lobby of that hospital, a man paralyzed from the neck down asked Jana to scratch his nose.
She did.
And he said eight words that stopped her cold.
“You have no idea how lucky you are.”
I want to be honest with you about what happened next. Because this is not a Hallmark movie moment. Jana didn’t float back to her room on a wave of gratitude and clarity. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had just been told she had no idea how lucky she was — by a man who couldn’t move his arms, while she sat in a rehab hospital unable to move anything below her chest. She was, by her own account, a little pissed off.
And that night she opened her journal with some of that energy still in her. A little snarky. A little defiant. And she wrote four words that were less a declaration of gratitude and more a challenge thrown at the page.
How lucky am I?
She didn’t know it in that moment, but the question — even asked with an attitude, even written with a little edge — took her around a corner she hadn’t seen coming. Because the question has a different frame than anything she’d been asking herself. It pointed her attention at what she had. What she could do. Her abilities, not her disabilities. The things that were still true even now. The question did the work. Even when the person asking it wasn’t ready to receive the answer. That is not a small thing. That is actually the most important thing about the 4-Minute Formula that most people never hear said out loud: you do not have to be in a good place to ask these questions. You do not have to feel lucky before you write “how lucky am I.” You do not have to be grateful before you write about gratitude. The question works regardless of the mood you bring to it. The RAS doesn’t care whether you’re asking with reverence or with an attitude. It just goes looking for the answer.
It took Jana years to recognize what that night in the lobby gave her. Years to see the man’s eight words as the gift they were. The hero’s journey doesn’t come with a narrator. You don’t know you’re at the turning point while you’re in it. You only know it looking back.
But the four words she wrote that night — a little snarky, a little defiant, not at all the serene journaling moment you might imagine — were the seed that grew into everything Living Lucky® is today.
Here is what I want you to understand about that question — not as a slogan or a tagline or a feel-good prompt, but as a mechanism.
Your brain cannot hold an open question and not try to answer it. The moment you ask “how lucky am I,” your Reticular Activating System — the filter that decides what you notice out of the 11 million bits of information flooding in every second — receives an instruction. Go find the evidence.
Go find the luck. Go find the thing that is good and present and worth being grateful for in this specific moment of this specific day.And it does. Every time. Not because life is perfect. Not because the hard things aren’t hard. But because there is always something. Always. The question is whether you’ve given your brain permission to go looking for it.
Jana gave her brain that permission at 15, in the hardest season of her life. And that permission — renewed every morning for thirty-five years — compounded into something neither of us could have predicted.
She went on to become an Elite Multi-Medalist in the US Paralympics, playing on Team USA Women’s Para Basketball — Bronze Medal in Atlanta in 1996, competing in Sydney in 2000, GOLD in Athens in 2004. Then in September 2024, at 49, she entered her very first adaptive water ski competition and finished last. Thirteen months later she stood on the podium at the Adaptive Water Ski World Championships in Mulwala, Australia — World Champion, world records in trick skiing, silver in Jump. Named USA Adaptive Athlete of the Year and International Adaptive Athlete of the Year. Inducted into the US Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame in 2025 alongside her 2004 Athens gold medal teammates.
And she did all of it — every single chapter of it — asking the same four words she wrote in that rehab journal on the night everything changed.
I want to tell you what happened along the way for me. Because Living Lucky® is not just Jana’s story.
Jana and I reached a point around age 35 where life felt like we were getting the short end of the stick. Not catastrophically. Just the quiet, creeping feeling that we were living someone else’s version of success and couldn’t quite find our own. We had corporate jobs. We had stability. We had all the things you’re supposed to want. And we were restless in a way we didn’t have language for yet. So we chose a different path. We quit. We invested in ourselves — in coaches, in courses, in the hard work of figuring out who we actually were and what we actually wanted. We became certified coaches ourselves. We started Living Lucky® from the belief that luck is not something that happens to you. It is something you create. Deliberately. Daily. With the questions you ask yourself and the attention you choose to give.
We went LIVE on Facebook at 6:55 every morning for over two years during the pandemic — fifteen minutes of connection and positivity for anyone who needed it, which turned out to be a lot of people. We bought a handmade camper from a man who’d built it for his wife to travel the country, but whose wife got cancer and couldn’t go. We took the Dream Camper on the road and asked strangers one question: “What’s your dream?” We wrote those dreams on stickers and pressed them to the outside of the camper. And months later, strangers started messaging us.
Their dreams were coming true. Not because of magic. Because someone had finally asked them the right question.
That’s what the right question does. That’s what it has always done.
This blog series has been nineteen different ways of saying the same thing: the questions you ask yourself shape the life you live. And the most powerful question we have ever found — in all our coaching, all our research, all our living — is also the simplest one.
How lucky am I?
We built eight journals around this philosophy. We built The Living Lucky Podcast that has now reached people in over 140 countries. We built courses, a coaching practice, a speaking career, and a movement — all of it rooted in the radical belief that you are the creator of your own reality, and that the creation begins with the questions you ask before the day gets loud.
We don’t find luck. We create it.
And we create it four minutes at a time, four questions at a time, one morning at a time, compounding quietly into the life we are consciously choosing to live. If you’ve read all twenty of these blogs, thank you. Not because we needed you to, but because it means something in you was ready to hear this. Ready to examine the stories you’ve been telling. Ready to ask better questions. Ready to bet on yourself.
If this is the first blog of ours you’ve read, welcome. Start anywhere. Start with another blog post or one any of the Living Lucky Podcast Episodes. Grad The Decision Matrix or a Living Lucky® Create Your Luck Journal off Amazon, or start right here, right now, with the one question that has outlasted every framework and every certificate and every grand plan Jana and I have ever made.
Write it down. By hand. Today.
See what your brain finds.
And then come back tomorrow morning and ask it again.
The 4-Minute Formula Journal gives that question a home — every morning, every page, built around the four questions that Jana’s story gave birth to. Available on Amazon and at livinglucky.com.
How lucky am I?
Write those four words. Right now. By hand if you can. And let your brain go to work.
Start Living Lucky® — four words. That’s where it starts. That’s always where it starts.
