Lucky or hard working?

[widowtwankywashroom]

Me and my husband are both 50+ we don't have primary aged children and I will preface this by saying we did have very hands on grandparents when our children were younger
We have both worked extremely hard, I am a nurse, so have done my fair share of weekends, nights, late finishes and early starts, my husband is a hard worker ( not physical ) but he puts in the hours and he has been well rewarded
We paid our mortgage off early due to always paying in extra - would forgo a night out to pay and extra £50 etc and me working extra shifts in Covid
Through good planning and using lots of interest free credit card deals we managed to get away 4 times this year and already have 4 holidays booked next year
My mum always says its because I am lucky - I don't think I am - I left school with 2 GCSE and have worked my arse off to get where I am and so has my husband
So is it luck or just hard bloody work
No one has ever said I am lucky doing a 12 hr shift in A&E or ICU on a Sunday
No one has ever said I am lucky going out on a night shift

OP, I think you've jumped the shark.

People were having a genuine conversation with you, and now you're just being ridiculous.

Bye bye!

A little honesty at last.

I suppose everyone should admire you all the more for your truthfulness.

You're really just the best kind of person there is OP. A true inspiration.

Do you not have to have a degree to be a nurse?

No I'm still here.
I am genuinely interested
My brother's have had the same opportunities as have my husbands siblings but we're all at very different stages

There's nothing in the success of your marriage that's been lucky? No loss of a child? No financial worries? Avoiding addiction problems? A faithful husband? (Or I suppose you avoided infidelity by hardwork too?) Poor MH?

I think you'd do well to remember pride comes before a fall. All of this stuff can turn on an instant.

Take a trip over to the Relationships board and you’ll see thousands of examples of women who have clearly tried their very hardest and made enormous sacrifices to maintain their relationships, and yet been unable to. Most people work to stay together; sometimes, the actions of one party, entirely out of the control of the other, mean that they can’t.

I hope you are a troll.

If this is really your attitude, you should not be allowed around vulnerable ill people.

Because all the hard work and staying power in the world is no use unless you have the good fortune to marry someone who doesn't cheat/drink/gamble/tire of you/change into someone you barely recognise over a lifetime together.

You do now, I was the last cohort of diploma nurses, but I did convert from diploma to degree in my last year. So I only had a bursary for 2 years and paid fees for one year

I don't understand why people get so offended at the suggestion that they could be lucky in some aspects of their life. It doesn't negate your hard work. It's just an acknowledgement that a lot of life is out of our hands, all we can do is our best with the cards we're dealt, which it sounds like you have done.

Do you not think there is any aspect of your life that luck has paid a factor in at all?
Lucky to have been born in the UK and not in the Gaza strip?
Lucky to be born in the 1970s and not the 1870s where you wouldn't have been able to have the career you have?
Lucky to have met a supportive husband and to have supportive family?
Lucky to have not been born with mental or physical disabilities that prevented you from working?

There are likely people who have worked exactly as hard as you have done, but not been able to pay off the mortgage early or go on as many holidays, or have children, because they discovered unexpected subsidence that cost thousands to put right, or they or their partner became seriously unwell and couldn't work or had fertility issues, or whatever...do you think those people deserved bad things happening to them or brought them upon themselves? If not, and you accept they were just unlucky, then surely you can accept that you are (in some respects) lucky as well as hardworking.

@widowtwankywashroom why are you so offended by the idea that luck may have played a part in your success? It doesn't mean you haven't also worked hard.

OP there are millions of people in this country who work hard all their lives but never get comfortable.

Are they just lazy?

I've no doubt you work hard, just like the vast majority of people. You would not have been able to do any of those night shifts and Sunday shifts if it wasn't for your children's grandparents I imagine.
So yes, you should acknowledge your luck and try not to sound so self satisfied, smug and gloating.

Wow, that was lucky for you.

I think luck is the wrong word, it implies that the person involved had nothing to do with it, but then hard work can, and very often does, imply that there were no outside forces that influenced anything at all, and as we don't do anything in a vacuum, there have to be some outside forces at play.
A lot also depends on other people's decisions and choices as well as our own. Other people's decisions have influenced where I am in life, as have my own.
My ex's decision to walk away and not support his child in any way, shape or form obviously had a negative impact on my situation, my family's decision to step in and provide the support that was needed at that time a positive one, my own decision to get my head down and work full time, shifts, nights, overtime and to have worked my way a little up the ladder (and I mean a little) to have a little more coming in meaning I can support my DD through university now, again a positive influence.
I'm in no where near a good a situation as you are, but it's better than it was and that's down to my hard work and influences from others that were fortunate. Had I not had the negative influences, I may well have been in a much better situation than I am now, and without the positive, a much worse one.

I don't think there's an issue with saying you've worked hard to achieve the situation you're in - until there's the implication that anyone that isn't in the same situation as you just didn't work as hard and that's why, because that's but unfortunately that's the way these conversations often go and it never ends well.

You do now, I was the last cohort of diploma nurses, but I did convert from diploma to degree in my last year. So I only had a bursary for 2 years and paid fees for one year

LUCK!!!!!!!!

This.

Please god let this be all nonsense. A nurse who thinks the situation her patients are in is all down to lack of hardwork?

And this

It is odd that the idea of being lucky seems to be so offensive to you. Is it that you really believe it's either or and if you admit to even a modicum of luck then you have to deny all your hard work?

Take COVID for example. Lots of people lost their businesses (and then suffered the ripple effects of that) despite their hard work because it was entirely out of their control.

Plenty of hcps died.

It's great that you worked hard through COVID - and I'm certainly grateful for people like you who were prepared to do that. However COVID could have had entirely different impact on your fortunes.

Not really
Means I had no support for a year and had to pay fees
I could have stayed on the diploma

It certainly could have been different

I think some people experience luck with regards to their career- right place, right time. For others it is down to sheer hard work, determination and having that ambitious streak. To say everyone’s success is just ‘luck’ devalues the active, conscious decisions that some people make to better themselves and the work that they put in to get there. Being able to purchase a property with a 5% deposit in the late 90’s early 2000’s was fortunate but it is what it is . No one is in control of their birth year or what house prices are doing around them at any given time.

It might not be 'luck' but it relies on the other person being willing and able to do the same thing - as I said in a pp - the influence of someone else is at play.
If your husband had decided he didn't want to work hard at it and stay together, no amount of hard work on your part would have made that change.
I was willing to work on the relationship I was in, my ex wasn't, that was his decision and that decision influenced my life.
Unless of course you believe that it's a failing on my part rather than his by default because I'm the one who was left in the worse situation?

You only had to pay tuition fees for one year unlike the nurses qualifying now.

Which was lucky for you, yes.