Appropriate for the month of St. Patrick's Day, one particularly lucky experience that I had professionally was the introduction I had from one of my managers at one of my first jobs after graduate school, more than 20 years ago, to the data visualization work of Edward Tufte. He had been a practicing architect in an earlier phase of his life, and showed me how important design thinking was to showing the impact of research results and helping people understand the insights you are trying to show them. (And of course, that everything is not as complicated as Charles Joseph Minard's iconic graphic of Napoleon's march to Moscow, below.)
In the years since then, I've grown to appreciate the importance of visualizing data clearly and simply, and I think back to that introduction in one of the earliest experiences of my career.
Finding my first job in Institutional Research was a stroke of luck! It's not a field I'd ever heard of before, and it certainly wasn't on my "dream job radar", but I am so glad I found it. I had been out of work for 4 months when my dad saw the ad in the newspaper and sent it to me. I went on the interview and thought I blew it. I actually accepted and started another job before I got the call back. It was a hard decision to accept the position when I had only been at my new job one day, but I did. Nine years later, I've worked in IR at three different institutions and I love it more than I could've imagined! 
I am not one to stop a celebrity or popular personality and make small talk for the sake of making small talk with them. I feel that they need their personal space and privacy like we all do. However during the Qualtrics Summit in 2016, I saw Captain Phillips in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in SLC and we were both grabbing a cup of coffee and pastry for breakfast. He said Good Morning to me and I replied back Good Morning Captain Phillips. He asked if I'd like to sit with him for breakfast. I obliged and we talked about the Summit, the Steven Tyler / Loving Mary Band concert from the night before and our hometowns.
#InsightSummit #2016 #CaptainPhillips
It's sentimental to say the least, but the luckiest I have ever been was being able to have my son.
I spent 4 years working with a fertility doctor before deciding to do In-Vitro Fertilization. They were able to collect 15 eggs from me, but only 6 actually made it to day 5. We had them all tested for genetic issues and only 1 was normal - that's my son.
I had multiple complications throughout my pregnancy to the point that we didn't know if we would both make it to the end.
We made it and he is a miracle.
I've never felt particularly lucky in life, but I do remember when we looking for our first foster dog, I felt lucky that the organization we were working with not only found us to be great foster dog parents, but that they had a particular dog in mind for us! I got hooked on fostering and helping behaviorally challenged dogs and we've had blessings from each dog we fostered and/or adopted. 
If I've sat here for 10 minutes and not really remembered any time I've had a stupid stroke of luck, I guess there is not much to tell. I've never been the one to win lottery prices or things like that. Not much luck there.
My wife was persistent that we keep dating in the beginning our relationship. Luckily I listened and two kids later things are still going great. So I was lucky to have listened to her. Always something 
For me, there are a couple of moments that come to mind.
But the most important one for me would be the luck that I had 3 years ago:
I was in a car accident. There was a traffic jam in front of me, which I had seen, but the driver behind me hadn't... So I got hit by that car from behind, causing me to hit the car in front of me.
All who were involved were very lucky 
, because no-one got hurt. I just had a small scratch on my leg, that was it.
Driving on the expressway when I heard a terrible metallic sound, so I took the next exit. When I stopped at the stop sign at the end of the ramp there was another loud metallic thump. On the ground under the front of my '65 Mustang was a large hunk of metal. Aging myself, but this was before cell phones and emergency flashers. While I was trying to figure out what to do a nearby home-owner came over to see if he could help. After looking under my car, he said really good thing you exited, that's your steering on the ground!
Second lucky moment of the day came when he said, I can fix it for you, it's just a broken cotter pin, I'm sure I have one that will work. He let me use his phone while he searched for it. My dad confirmed he had the correct fix. 10 minutes later I was back on the road. Don't think I ever processed how lucky I was that day!
If I look back at my professionnal journey, I think the bests things that happened to me was the times I was forced to change. Like when My contract was terminated or when the company was bought and I lose my job.
I recognize it is not fun on the day it's happen but every time I had lose a job, I find a new place, or a new opportunity to build my experience and to grow professionnaly.
So I could say that every difficulty that came to me was a lucky experience in my life.
When I was looking for side gigs while attempting an acting career, I decided to apply for seasonal work at Universal Studios Hollywood which was right down the street. They had recently restarted their Halloween Horror Nights event and that year, the A Nightmare on Elm Street films were featured in a haunted house/maze, and that so happens to be my favorite horror franchise. I was going for a position in the talent pool to replace any performers who were unavailable. I got the role, ended up filling in for a role in the Elm Street house and then ended up permanently filling a role in that house for the remainder of the event because someone had quit.
After the Halloween event was over, I was asked if I was interested in continuing employment with Universal and I said yes. I applied to and got a role as an interviewer in the Consumer Insights department with no research background and started a new career in research. That was almost 14 years ago.
When I was in high school, my friend's sisters invited me to tag along on a shopping trip with them and their mother. On the day of our trip, we found ourselves sitting in a waiting area outside the fitting rooms as their mother tried on clothes. The waiting area was poorly designed. The department's phone was placed low on a wall above the couch, about an inch away from our heads where we sat. The store was packed and the phone was constantly ringing, so there was an awkward shuffle between us and the department manager every time she had to answer it. After about 10-15 awkward rearrangements around us, the phone, and other obstacles in the waiting room, the manager finally said (read: yelled), "Why don't YOU answer the phone for once? Don't you have jobs?"
We replied, "Well... no, we don't."
She basically offered us jobs on the spot. I started work about a week later. The fitting rooms were renovated a few months after that to fix the layout issues. I was able to work there on-and-off as I completed high school, college, and graduate school in different states. I rarely shopped there before that day, but now the store is one of my favorites and will always hold a special place in my heart! All thanks to one lucky trip with my friend's family, and a poorly designed waiting room with a busy phone line. 
What a great question...and I do believe that there is a lot of peer-reviewed research about the relationship between gratitude and wellbeing...perhaps more than correlation. I love having the opportunity of supporting Qualtrics, REDCap, and best practices in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research at my university. I feel fortunate to work for Boston College with passionate intellectually engaged students and colleagues.
I am grateful to be employed in a position that allowed me to protect myself. my family, colleagues, and students during this pandemic while engaging my mind and my passion for best research practices and research integrity.
I am grateful that I have access to good health care and know that this pandemic brought into stark relief the inequities in health care in the USA and across the world. I strongly believe that access to good health care should be a right for every human being, not a privilege.
I was not grateful to sit in a surgeon's office at a major teaching hospital in Boston (although I was and am profoundly grateful to be able to access some of the best health care in the world) over five years ago and hear that they had found suspicious tumors in my neck. Cancer is not the club that anyone wants to join, and over the past five years, through treatments and ongoing observations, I am doing much better than I expected. I am grateful for each day. Through my cancer journey, I have met some of the kindest, bravest, compassionate, resilient people that I have ever encountered. Some of these people have joined me in "paying it forward" by supporting other survivors who are preparing for and undergoing treatment
I am grateful to the generosity of Qualtrics in supporting people living with cancer. I am most grateful that two and half years after I was diagnosed, I was able to hold my newborn first grandchild. To date that is still, along with meeting my own two daughters on the days that they were born - the most profound experience of my life.
I am truly grateful to be alive.
It was in your examples, but I did indeed find $100 in $20 bills once! It was raining, and the money was soaked, but dried out nicely. 
There was no way I was going to find the original owner, and it was a small enough amount not to take it to the police, so I really did feel lucky.
I was also once abroad at the age of 21, and in a taxi on the way to the airport at 3 am. I didn't realize the airport didn't open until 5 am and for some reason, I couldn't return to where I was staying...I don't remember exactly why...maybe the timing to get back to the airport. In any case, I felt very lucky to have an incredibly kind taxi driver who found a safe place for me to wait things out and then returned just before 5 to make sure I had a ride the rest of the way.
