If you’ve spent more than five minutes on the internet, you’ve probably seen his face. Frane Selak. The Croatian music teacher who supposedly cheated death seven times before hitting a massive lottery jackpot. It's the kind of story that makes you feel like your own life is a bit boring. I mean, who else falls out of a plane and lands in a haystack while nineteen other people perish?
But here's the thing.
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Luck is a weird, messy, often unverified business. Honestly, when we talk about the "luckiest guy in the world," we’re usually talking about a mix of incredible survival and statistical anomalies that shouldn't exist. Some of these stories are caught on camera. Others? They’re more like urban legends that got a little too much airtime.
The Myth and Reality of Frane Selak
Frane Selak is basically the patron saint of the "luckiest guy" title. His resume of disasters is honestly exhausting to read.
According to him, it started in 1962. He was on a train from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik. The train derailed and plunged into an icy river. Seventeen people drowned. Frane? He swam to shore with a broken arm and hypothermia.
Then came the plane. 1963. He says a door blew off, and he was sucked out of the aircraft. He woke up in a haystack. The plane crashed, and again, everyone else died.
The list goes on. A bus crash in 1966. Two different cars catching fire in the early 70s. Getting hit by a bus in 1995. And finally, in 1996, he drove his Skoda off a mountain road to avoid a UN truck, jumped out at the last second, and watched his car explode 300 feet below.
Is it actually true?
Here is where it gets kinda dicey. Journalists have spent years trying to verify these specific disasters. There aren't many official records of a plane crash in Croatia in 1963 that fits his description. Same goes for some of the other incidents.
Does that mean he’s a liar? Not necessarily. But it means the "luckiest guy" narrative might be part truth, part legendary storytelling from a man who clearly enjoyed the spotlight. What is verified is his 2003 lottery win. He won about $1 million (600,000 pounds) just two days after his 73rd birthday.
He eventually gave most of it away. He said money couldn't buy happiness and he’d rather live a simple life with his fifth wife. That, to me, is the most human part of the whole saga.
The Man Who Won Twice on Camera
If Selak’s story feels too much like a movie, Bill Morgan’s story is the one that actually has the receipts.
Bill was an Australian truck driver. In 1998, he was in a horrific accident. He didn't just get hurt; he had a massive heart attack because of an allergic reaction to medication.
Bill Morgan was clinically dead for 14 minutes and 38 seconds.
He spent 12 days in a coma. His family was told to turn off the life support. They didn't. He woke up.
A year later, he bought a scratch-off ticket and won a car worth about $30,000 AUD. A local news station in Melbourne thought this was a great "human interest" story. They asked him to come down to the shop and re-enact the win for the cameras.
The Unscripted Jackpot
This is the video you’ve probably seen on YouTube. It’s grainy, 90s television at its best. Bill stands at the counter, scratches a fresh ticket for the "B-roll" footage, and then he just... stops.
He doesn't look happy. He looks terrified.
"I just won 250,000," he says. "I’m not joking."
He starts shaking. He almost has another heart attack right there. The camera captures the exact moment his life changes for the second time in twelve months. It’s the ultimate proof that sometimes, the universe just decides it owes you one.
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Joan Ginther: Math or Magic?
Then you have Joan Ginther. If Frane Selak is about surviving death, Joan is about conquering the system.
She is often called the luckiest woman in the world, but "lucky" might be an insult to her brain. Joan was a math professor with a Ph.D. from Stanford. She specialized in statistics.
She won the Texas lottery four times:
- $5.4 million in 1993.
- $2 million in 2006.
- $3 million in 2008.
- $10 million in 2010.
The odds of this happening by pure "luck" are roughly 1 in 18 septillion. That’s a number with 24 zeros.
The Strategy Behind the Wins
Most people think she just got lucky. But mathematicians who have studied her wins think she figured out the algorithm.
She lived in Las Vegas but would travel back to a specific store in Bishop, Texas, to buy her tickets. Some believe she knew when the "winning" shipments of scratch-offs were being delivered based on the schedule of the Texas Lottery Commission.
She wasn't cheating. She was just better at math than the people who designed the game. It’s a different kind of luck—the kind you build yourself with a high-level degree and a lot of patience.
Why We Are Obsessed With These Stories
We love the "luckiest guy" trope because it gives us hope that the world isn't just a series of cold, hard probabilities.
We want to believe that even if a plane door blows off, there's a haystack waiting for us. Or that even if our heart stops for 14 minutes, we might end up with a quarter-million dollars and a new house.
But there’s a flip side.
Was Frane Selak lucky because he survived seven disasters, or was he the unluckiest man on Earth because he kept ending up in them?
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Tsutomu Yamaguchi is another one. He was in Hiroshima for work when the first atomic bomb dropped. He was burnt and bleeding. He got on a train and went home. Home was Nagasaki. He arrived just in time for the second bomb. He survived that, too, and lived to be 93.
Is that luck? Or is that just the most harrowing week any human has ever endured?
Practical Lessons From the "Luckiest"
You probably won't survive two atomic bombs or win the lottery four times. Sorry. But looking at these outliers, there are actually a few things we can take away for our own lives.
- Resilience is a magnet. Bill Morgan didn't give up after his heart stopped. He kept going, he got engaged, he looked for a new job. Luck often finds people who are still in the game.
- Systems have cracks. Joan Ginther proved that if you understand the "rules" better than everyone else, you can find an edge. Whether that's in business or a scratch-off ticket, expertise matters.
- Perspective changes the narrative. Frane Selak eventually called himself "the unluckiest man" because of all the trauma. Later, he leaned into the "luckiest" title. How you frame your own "bad breaks" determines how you move forward.
- Verification is everything. In the age of AI and viral hoaxes, always look for the evidence. Bill Morgan has the video. Joan Ginther has the public records. Frane Selak has the stories. All are fascinating, but only some are ironclad.
If you want to improve your own "luck," stop waiting for the plane door to fall off. Instead, look at the math like Joan or the resilience like Bill.
Start by auditing your own "near-misses." We often forget the times things almost went wrong but didn't. Maybe you're luckier than you think right now. You just haven't bought the right ticket yet.
To dive deeper into the reality of these stories, you should check out the archives of the Daily Telegraph or BBC News from the late 90s and early 2000s. They contain the original interviews with Bill Morgan and the initial reports on Selak before the internet turned them into myths. You can also look into the statistical breakdown of lottery odds by experts like Skip Garibaldi, who has written extensively on whether Joan Ginther's wins were truly random.