How to Train Your Mind to Create Luck with Kyyah Abdul
There is a version of luck that feels like something that happens to other people. The right opportunity landing in someone else's lap. The connection made at just the right moment. The risk that paid off for the person who seemed, somehow, less afraid than you.
And then there is the kind of luck we talk about on She's So Lucky, which is something you build, practice, and train into existence. That second kind was the entire energy of my conversation with Kyyah Abdul, and I genuinely think this episode might be one of the most useful things I've put out this year.
Kyyah is a regulatory affairs professional, content creator, and someone who has one of the most naturally well-calibrated minds I've ever encountered in a conversation. She blends neuroscience, lived experience, and a zero-tolerance policy for nonsense into advice that is practical, funny, and a little bit uncomfortable in the best way. I sat down with her for episode 346 and we covered everything from how a lucky mind actually gets built, to why your boundaries have nothing to do with the other person.
Here's what we got into.
What Does It Mean to Have a Lucky Mind?
The first thing Kyyah said that made me stop and write something down was this: a lucky mind is trained. Not inherited, not stumbled into, and not reserved for people who grew up with more confidence than the rest of us.
She described it as a muscle, which I know sounds like something you've heard before, but stick with her because the specifics matter. A lucky mind, according to Kyyah, is built on belief in yourself, determination, grit, and the ability to follow through. But the piece that most people overlook is decisiveness. She talked about decision-making as its own muscle entirely, and the idea that what actually moves you forward is not making the right decision, it is making a decision at all and creating momentum from it.
This came up because I asked her if she'd always been decisive, and she laughed and said yes, since childhood, in a way that apparently made her a very opinionated five-year-old. But she also gave really practical advice for people who are still building that muscle, which is to start by getting quiet about what you actually want. Not what your friends think you should do, not what makes sense on paper, not what gets the group chat's approval. What do you want, and what are you genuinely passionate about? Once you can answer that clearly, the smaller decisions start to feel easier because you have a north star to make them against.
What she also said, and this one hit me, is that not trying at all is the real failure.
The Real Key to Getting Unstuck
A lot of the people who find this show are not lazy. They are thoughtful, careful, and often so full of potential that the weight of it is almost paralyzing. If that is you, this episode has something specific for you.
Kyyah talked about the role that safety plays in our ability to take risks, and it genuinely reframed something I had never fully connected before. The reason some people can quit their jobs and start something new without blinking is not because they're braver. It's because they feel safe enough to do it, whether that safety comes from a partner, a family safety net, savings, or a community that has their back.
For those of us who don't have all of that built in, the work is not about being more fearless. It's about deliberately building whatever safety looks like for you. I shared my own experience of making the leap from corporate to running my business full time, and it was a multi-year, very methodical process of paying down debt, building savings, creating recurring income streams. I didn't even realize at the time that I was building myself a safety net. I was just trying to make the numbers work. But that's exactly what it was.
The invitation in this episode is to figure out what safety means to you specifically, and then figure out how to build it, one step at a time.
Why Boundaries Are Not About the Other Person
This was the moment in the conversation that I think is going to stick with people the longest, because Kyyah said something that completely reframes the way most of us think about setting limits with the people in our lives.
Boundaries are not for other people. They’re for you.
She made the point that so much of the frustration people feel around boundaries comes from the expectation that setting one will change how the other person behaves. And when it doesn't, it feels like the boundary failed. But that's not how it works. You can’t manage another person's behavior. What you can do is decide what you will and will not allow into your life, and then actually honor that decision yourself.
She put it plainly: the question is not whether they respected your boundary. The question is whether you did.
Kyyah was also refreshingly clear that she doesn't automatically advocate for cutting people off. She talked about trying to work through the issue first, and when that isn't possible, creating distance, showing up differently, or simply accepting that some people are who they are and not giving them access to the parts of your life that they haven't earned. The point isn’t to punish anyone. The point is to protect yourself.
How to Set Better Boundaries on Social Media
The social media piece of this conversation was fascinating partly because Kyyah is someone who creates content regularly but has built a very deliberate wall between her online presence and her actual life. She uses a shortened version of her name. She doesn't share where she works, because as she put it, the last thing she needs is someone calling her employer with a link to her TikToks. Her husband doesn't appear on her platforms because he doesn't want to, and she respects his privacy. She's even careful about her last name.
And yet, watching her content, you feel like you genuinely know her. You understand how she thinks, what she values, how she engages with the world. She gave me the best way I've heard to describe this: "You get enough to feel like you're getting enough."
That distinction matters. Sharing authentically does not require sharing everything. The goal is not to be an open book. The goal is to let people see enough of who you are that they trust you and want to keep coming back. Where you draw the lines is entirely yours to decide, and you are allowed to draw them firmly.
Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
We spent a good chunk of the episode talking about discomfort, and Kyyah's perspective on it is one I've heard echoed by almost every successful person I've had the privilege of sitting across from. The people who build lives they're proud of are almost always people who stopped running from hard things.
She said it simply: being uncomfortable is the only way to have a comfortable life.
She talked about working full-time at a pharmacy while carrying 19 credits as a pre-med biology major, paying her own rent, and at one point living in a frat house because it was cheap. Not glamorous. Very uncomfortable. But looking back, she said she regrets none of it, because each of those seasons taught her that she could handle hard things. And once you know that about yourself, hard things stop being as scary.
I connected this to fitness, which I talk about a lot because for me it genuinely works as a daily training ground for discomfort. Getting up and doing the hard physical thing first thing in the morning is proof that I can do hard things. When the difficult email arrives later, or the uncomfortable conversation needs to happen, it registers a little differently. I already did something hard today. I know what that feels like. I survived it.
The Friends You Keep and the Luck You Create
Lucky people are surrounded by people committed to growth. Kyyah said this early in our conversation and it became a thread we kept coming back to throughout the episode.
She's a big believer in relational diversity, the idea that you don't need a handful of people who are everything to you, but rather a wide net of relationships where different people meet different needs. Her close circle includes friends from middle school, college, her master's program, and family, and they are genuinely very different people with very different lives. What they have in common is character, accountability, and honesty.
She also gave one of the more useful pieces of advice I've heard for navigating friendships that aren't working: sometimes the problem isn't that you need to set a boundary. Sometimes the problem is that you and this person are simply not compatible. That's not a failure. That's just information. And being able to name it without drama or resentment is, in Kyyah's words, what makes your life a lot more peaceful.
One Takeaway for Building a Lucky Mind
I closed the episode asking her for one takeaway for anyone who wants to bet on themself and build a lucky mind. Kyyah’s response was direct, and exactly what we needed to hear.
Bet on yourself. Believe in yourself. Everybody in the world will probably doubt you at some point. You don't want to be the one who starts with yourself.
She's So Lucky is a podcast for ambitious women who are ready to create their own luck. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
