To say your good fortune is down to luck....

[Shallowstreams]

On threads here I keep reading people saying how they've 'worked hard' and as such can pay off their entire mortgage by mid thirties or similar.

But most people work hard and that's a distant dream. It's only achievable to get and pay off a decent sized mortgage if you've had the luck in whatever shape or form to get an extremely high paying job or a very low mortgage perhaps because of family help or inheritance.

I work very hard and earn very well as does my husband yet our mortgage won't be paid off for many many years, and I'm almost 40.

It just annoys me that people seem to think they've managed to achieve this as they've worked harder than others and are not acknowledging the good fortune that has put them in this position

AIBU?

YABU. We have paid a mortgage off but it wasn't luck it was good financial decisions and hard work and sacrifice. Neither of us have jobs anyone else couldn't have, we bought a house that was well within our means and compromised a little bit on area and size of house. Then we made it a priority to overpay the mortgage every month by standing order and any luxuries were only bought after that. Yabvu to diminish all we have achieved just down to luck.

It's both.

I've done well over my life with sheer hard work & sacrifices - but also 'right place, right time' greased the wheels.

I've had a run of 'bad luck' over the last 4 years, during which I lost my physical & mental health - knocking on from that, I was medically discharged from my job & my marriage ended.

The reason I'm still keeping on keeping on, is down to digging down deeper than ever before - but it's not just hard work obvs, it's also luck that my health stayed steady enough to allow me to dig deep. One curveball and I'm set back a hundred paces again (I'm on a very fine balance at the moment & can tip either way, hence being very lucky that another blow hasn't knocked me back yet).

So YA definitely being U saying it's just luck.

It's a combination of both luck and hard work.

There is also something that neither of those cover which is resilience in the face of difficult circumstances.

Quite a few previous posters have said...what about having a disability? What about being made redundancy? They're luck!

Well. Yes (though I can argue the point on redundancy) but I'm disabled (and have had to have periods sick from work because of it) and have been made redundant, had an abusive father, etc and I'm still highly paid. You can't rule out how much being able to bounce back from bad luck influences you're overall success.

Yes, stumbly, I agree & was thinking along those lines, whwn I read this thread.Also, I.think it has a lot to do with personality types. I am not ambitious but have made it in other ways. I am fiercely independent. These traits have been a blessing and a curse.

I'm in the YABU camp. Does luck play a part in people doing well? To some extent yes. But I think to say it's all down to luck really diminishes the effort some people make to overcome the hand that luck, genetics, ancestry and whatever else gave them.

I haven't paid my mortgage off yet, but I'm late 20s with a good job, good wage, progressing well etc. But most of it isn't down to luck.

I'm fairly intelligent - guess that's lucky. I also met a nice guy and married him young, and one of his parents is supportive and helped out with his share of buying a house, so i guess thats lucky too.

But on the flip side I grew up on a rough council estate where drugs, teen pregnancy and crime were endemic and a life on benefits was a norm for many. Of the 30 kids in my primary school class only a handful had a working parent. I grew up in a single parent household with a mum who drank and smoked a large propionate of our income. When it came to choosing high school I said I didn't want to go to my catchment school, looked at league table in our local paper and asked my mum to apply for another school. Luckily I got in as my local school was truly dreadful.

I worked bloody hard at school, plus worked multiple part time jobs from when I was 15 so that I could afford to go to school, have uniform and clothes, pay to go to uni open days and interviews. Got in to Oxford. Then got thrown out and ended up in a council flat at 17 starting from scratch. Couldn't afford Oxford, got a full time job and applied to uni locally and proceeded to work full time while doing a full time degree - which meant I graduated with a 2.1 instead of the first I was capable of but also meant that when I applied for competitive graduate roles I did well because I had better experience. Im taking incredibly hard professional exams. I've taken roles requiring travel and working away from home even though I have dd because it helps to build my career. I've been through redundancy, workplace bullying etc. I only have one child because I get very ill when pregnant so having another could be very damaging to my career so I have to plan timing really well before having another. I've been injured in an accident and had months off work, DH was injured in a car crash and had to give up his job and start from scratch. I'm also autistic.

I don't think I've been especially lucky or privileged really, and so it annoys me when people say it's all down to luck because there's often more to it than that

X posted with stumbly, resilience is definitely a part of it and funnily enough is how my mum in law describes me - she's known me since I was 18 so has a fair idea .

The OP did not say it was all down to luck, Statistically . Has anyone on this thread?

But resilience is believed to be partly genetic too - luck again.

So both.

If you say hard work only - you're dismissing the issues of birth circumstances, illness and disability etc

If you say luck only you dismiss people's efforts

So both

The op doesn't explicitly say luck only but it certainly suggests it's the dominant force and plays down hard work etc as do many other posts. It's a long thread and I'm on a phone so I'm not going to go back through every post. There's also been several threads of this ilk where many people try to reduce everything to luck so it was a more general response

Sorry to keep banging on about Matthew Syed, but yes he also said resilience played a part in success, along with a willingness to learn from your mistakes.

I personally think that talent, hard work, resilience and whatever else will only get you so far - you need a bit of luck too. Even if it's just being in the right place at the right time.

BUT perhaps I think that because I work really hard and I'm very resilient (I always say the thing I'm most successful at is failing), but I'm not remotely successful in either of my two jobs. I earn about 40p and I'm mostly ignored and overlooked, and my hard work taken for granted.

It's easier for me to attribute my lack of success to bad luck than a lack of talent, I think. Whereas if I was successful, it would be easier to say it was because of my hard graft than a dose of good luck. Does that make sense?

It's a combination of both, but those people who make good decisions are probably able to do so because of a relatively good upbringing, which is luck I suppose. But some people really do drag themselves up by their boot strings. Other people make huge sacrifices.

But my generation will definitely have been luckier than the current generation as a whole.

Of coruse some luck comes into it. However many of us who earn a lot have had endless set backs, redundancies, deaths,divorces, illness and all the rest but we seem to be able to bounce back from them like a rubber ball - it's that resilence, risk taking, positive mental attitude. that is not entirely down to luck - you can change your thought you know. it's not that hard. When a difficult thought comes into your head - I cannot do this or this is going to go wrong or that's it I've been sacked because I'm useless you can just change how that thought is and get yourself out of the mess.

Of course as everyone is saying on the thread in some cases bad luck is definitely there - if I lost all my limbs I could still work as I could just speak at the screen to earn my money but I would certainly be unlucky.

In fact the reason I have limbs at all is not really luck. My mother was wise and well read and bright and thought what was natural was usually best for you (my own philosophy too with food, life etc). So when she was offered the drug that would have resulted in thalidomide when pregnant with me she refused it. Now was that luck? Well yes in the sense she was a wise mother and I was lucky to have her but it was also her conscious choice. Just as was it luck I chose to work really hard and get the best exams in the school and university and pick a high paid career when others about me were out having sex and getting drunk over that decade? It was luck in that I was able to put off to tomorrow pleasures in return for a better future whereas some people are impulsive and self indulgent and want everything today thus ensuring their future is worse.

It is very hard to extricate luck from hard work issues.

I find this is a really good short, visual explanation of the basics:
thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

There's no such thing as equality of opportunity, because if you don't know something exists you can't work towards it, for example, I only discovered that the field I currently work in was even a thing, after I'd graduated (twice) and got my first professional (dead end, as promotion was only available to others with a different degree) job.

The number of people I work with whose parents were in a related field, or have used contacts to gain work is huge, compared to previous employments. The pay is much higher too.

So, now at 40, I know what I want to do when I grow up (kind of)!

But I also noticed in other employments there was a marked difference between the work experience week the CEO's son had, compared to that of the Licensing Assistants son, with the CEO's son gaining much more of an 'overview' than experiencing any 'real' work. I thought I'd done well to work on the shop floor in Boots for the week!

Realistically I think it's a mixture of both, but I maintain that (successful) people put way too much stock on the hard work element, and don't realise how much of that involved luck. People saying on here that it's "purely down to hard graft" when if you read their story there was numerous elements of luck involved.

Maybe "luck" is the wrong word, external influence may be better.

Some of the hardest working people are the lowest paid/most struggling.

I am a very hard worker. I "do more" than my colleagues and have always been one of the "hardest workers" in the team in all my previous jobs. That has benefitted me. But there were others who had friends in high places who also got ahead, even when they weren't good at the job or a hard worker. And other hard workers were left behind. So I really don't think it's purely down to hard work.

Maybe "luck" is the wrong word, external influence may be better.

Agreed. External influence is better than luck, like DanaBarrett says you can't work hard towards an opportunity you don't know exists!

It is dangerous to think too much rides on external influence/luck though - because then you can't see a way out of a difficult situation/point in your life.

If you believe that there isn't any point in doing x y z because its all just luck anyway, then you never improve things and can become very bitter.

Yes agree its mix of hard work & external factors. So as an example, I worked bloody hard and got a good degree - but I was lucky to come from a family who encourage me to go, where it wasn't normal to get a job at 16.

Lady I work with didn't even know she could have gone, great grades, just went to the sort of school where it was assumed she'd leave at 16, so she did.

No it's not down to luck. DH and I met 10 years ago. Today we are both successful and have 3 DC age 4 and under. It's stressful but we are making strategic choices to enable future success. In another decade these strategic choices will pay off and to call it luck is insulting.

What is true is that money makes money. We have found that we are able to do things that reduce our monthly costs. As an example, we pay $2500 a month for housing (we are in the US) because we bought the building and rent the other half out. We are looking at buying another building and found something for $1.5 million that needs $250k spent on it. After rental income our monthly cost, including cost of capital, will be $1500 and we will be in 2000sqft with a garden. To say that is luck is not correct.

To get the cash DH and I both work having put ourselves through professional qualifications and an MBA. DH runs a business on the side which I help run. We employ about 150 people in Ohio. DH was able to start his business because he has worked for his employer since he was 17. He saw an opportunity and the company wanted to invest but not run it. In return they have been able to retain DH who is one of 4 people management have in mind to run the company once the current CEO retires in 10-15 years.

To get into that position, DH did his MBA having not been to university to complete a bachelor degree. He studied PT over 3 years while I qualified as a CPA and had two children. To say it's luck that he is in the position he is in at work is not true. He has colleagues he has been promoted over and they asked why. It should have been obvious at sales meetings when he had the highest net prices per unit, highest customer retention and 2nd highest new customers by volume. He took a product they paid money to dispose and managed to find someone willing to buy it. He had and continues to have vision, not luck. No bloody wonder his employer wants him to run the company!

I have myself been laid off 3 times, in 2008, 2009 and 2012. Each time I picked myself up and kept going. In 2012 I was pregnant with my 2nd when I was laid off. I was hired when I was 7 months pregnant.

YANBU

Want2bSupermum we are not saying its all down to luck, but it can tip the balance, there are tonnes of hard working people who set up their own business that failed for reasons out of their control, economic downturn, socio economic changes in a location, getting ripped off by a supplier etc. I think its something like 60% of restaurants fail, and I am sure thats not through lack of hard work.

You seemed to have done well but in UK people might have struggled to raise any of that capital to be able to buy that property as well as fund further study. Many tales from America where its just down to luck and health insurance as to you becoming bankrupt overnight.

An interesting though dry read is work by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Which picks apart some of the false success attributed to things, where failure while following the exact same process is not acknowledged (survivor bias)

I struggle with this one. I have always worked hard. Always. I've worked several jobs to keep a roof over my head.

I've been paying a mortgage for 15 years. Still have 30 years to pay it off - bought in 2006. Ended up in negative equity.

Nervous breakdown due to stress and marital issues 2 years ago.

Marriage now over. Facing prospect of renting as I don't earn enough to obtain a mortgage on my own.

I would like to think there was a lot of bad luck involved in bringing me to the situation I am in and not all poor decision making.
If I believed differently I would probably give up now.

I do feel saddened by this thread in the sense that I'm not where I thought I might be and I'll probably never have a career because at 40 I'm perceived by empolyers as being too dyed in the wool.

I still have rotten luck when it comes to getting a job - seemingly attracting crazy nasty bitches for bosses.

I think I'm probably just made up wrong.

I think yanbu. My mum worked probably 3 times as hard as I do for probably 10 times less than what I earn. She sacrificed and struggled as a single parent. She didn't have any of the 'luck' that I had, for example, one of those pieces of luck was having her as a mum who helped me get to uni and supported me financially with uni as best she could. Mum didn't have the opportunities that I had and then circumstances made it difficult to change things. I had lots of opportunities which I think was lucky.

It's down to luck, upbringing ect
I never had a great upbringing and was extremely stressed due to this I dropped out of college and was depressed for a long time.
Only really since 25 I have gotten over a lot of things and I am able to put my life on track but I cannot get a mortgage due to going bankrupt at 23.
I do think if I had certain peoples upbringing then I wouldn't be in the position I am now and probably would of had a mortgage.

Luck plays its part, both good and bad.

But few of us have no control over their lives. We are capable of agency and influence.

We have to take some responsibility for our own outcomes.