On Episode 545: The Secret of Success: Luck vs. Hard Work, we dig into the topic of luck, privilege, and hard work, and how, when they all come together, amazing things can happen.
You’ve landed that amazing job, or maybe you’re successfully living abroad in the country you’ve always dreamed of, or you’ve published your book, bought your dream home, won a major award in your industry, but the question is: can you chalk it all up to hard work? Or was there some luck involved? And how much of what you’ve achieved can be attributed to privilege?
You can listen right here, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.
Related Episodes:
Episode 482: When Little Things Line Up
Here are 5 key points from the episode:
- Katy and Tiffany discuss exploring the topics of luck versus hard work and how privilege impacts success.
- They acknowledge that people often feel defensive when privilege is brought up, not wanting their accomplishments diminished.
- Both recognize elements of luck and privilege in their own lives, such as educated parents and travel experiences, alongside their hard work.
- Tiffany shares examples of luck in her life, including getting her book agent through a Twitter event.
- They emphasize the importance of balancing recognition of hard work with awareness of privilege and luck in life accomplishments.
Full Episode Transcript:
Katy
Hello. This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall. Support for this show comes from you. If you have the means and you like to listen, please support this work at www.patreon.com/thebittersweetlifepodcast. There’s a link in the show notes. And please know you matter to the health and life of this show. Now, when a show is ten years old with over 500 episodes, there are a lot of great topics and shows in the archives, plenty you’ve probably missed. Today we’re going to revisit one of those conversations. Today we listen back to a conversation from October 10, 2021. I hope you enjoy this look back.
Introduction
Welcome to The Bittersweet Life, a show about living abroad and moving home. And more than that, it’s a deep exploration of what it means to live, to truly be alive. Your host, Tiffany Parks, is a childhood friend of mine. She lives in Rome, Italy. She moved there from the United States 16 years ago. And me, I’m Katy Sewall. I was a short term expat for a time, living in Italy, right down the street from Tiffany. And then I moved home to Seattle, Washington. That’s where I am now. So you are in the right place if you love Italy or travel. If you’re thinking about moving abroad or lived in a foreign place in the past. This is a show infused with art and literature and history. It’s a show about life. And we’re glad you’re here.
Welcome to Rome. This is The Bittersweet Life with Katy Sewall and Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Hello. This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
And today we’re going to tackle a topic, a very large topic. So we may not totally tackle it, but we’ll try something that Tiffany texted to me the other day. You wrote, I should read you verbatim. Actually, I made a note of what you wrote, but let me, let me read what you actually wrote. Okay. You said episode idea, luck versus hard work. When someone is successful or fulfills a goal like living abroad, is it more due to luck or hard work? And how much does privilege play a part? So before we get into privilege, luck and hard work, why are you thinking about this right now?
Tiffany
Well, it’s honestly something that has been something I’ve thought about for a long time, for years and years and years, actually. Not that I’m constantly dwelling on it, but it’s something that comes up, that pops up every once in a while when people have a certain type of conversation or I see people write a certain type of thing online. There must have been something that triggered it that day, because I remember picking up my phone and just writing that off to you. We weren’t even talking about episode ideas. We weren’t brainstorming. It was just something. And I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget it. That’s why I texted it to you. So I must have seen something, and I can’t remember what I saw the other day that made me write to you. But I can tell you that years and years ago, a decade ago or so, when I was just starting blogging myself and I was writing a lot about, you know, Rome and expat life, and I never got as deep into it as we do on this show, but I did talk about it and I followed a lot of other people’s blogs because back in those days, we had more time. For some reason, we had time for blogs. No one has time to read blogs anymore, but we did back then. And I remember reading on someone’s blog and I, and I can’t tell you who it was because I don’t remember. It was an expat living in Italy, and she wrote a post that was along the lines of, you know, I always get this comment from people, you’re so lucky. You live in Italy, you’re so lucky. What a wonderful life. What a beautiful life. You’re just so lucky. What a great opportunity. And her reaction in this blog post was, it’s not luck. I worked my buns off to have this life and I not only worked hard, but I made huge risks and sacrifices for this life. And I get that. I do get that. I’m not going to sit here and say that I agree with people who whine and say, oh, I can’t do that because of not whining, but, you know, people who make excuses for not following their dreams. I can’t do it because x, y, z, I can’t do it because this and that, and I can’t do it because of this. That’s not the way I like to see the world. But I do feel like me personally, I can’t speak for anyone else, but, like, I look at my life and I think to myself, how did I get here? How was I able to do this? And I can guarantee you that it wasn’t just because of me.
Katy
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Tiffany
So much went in to where I am now. I mean, nobody does anything by themselves 100%, you know?
Katy
Yeah. Yeah.
Tiffany
Except for maybe Oprah. I don’t know. Even she, even Oprah had to have somebody helping her out at some point.
Katy
Yes.
Tiffany
It really makes me think about it because it’s something that I can see both sides of. Because I can see the side of, like, you make your own opportunities and you manifest your own luck and you bring people into your life with your positive energy that are going to help you. I mean, I totally buy that way of thinking, but I also buy that, like, if I hadn’t had the mother that I had and the education that I had, etcetera.
Katy
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don’t necessarily believe as much in, like, the manifestations of things and that sort of thinking, but I have a lot of thoughts about this, actually, because when we talk about privilege as a society, because that’s kind of what you’re getting at. You had a certain mother and that was a privilege because of her.
Tiffany
Yeah, I did not pick her. Right, I got her.
Katy
Right, you got her. And whenever people talk about privilege, you immediately get into, like, a lot of people anyway, start to feel guilt. And that’s why I think you get a blog post like that girl saying, I did this. This was hard work for me. You know, you immediately get people on the defensive like, hey, it’s not the privilege. I worked really hard for this. And I think that you have to separate the guilt from the conversation of privilege because then you can actually assess what cultural advantages you had. Because, I mean, let’s go back to your mom. It was a privilege that your mother, let’s say, at the very base level, had traveled to a different country before, you know, that she was interested in Europe and talked to you about it, that she took you there when you were a young person. It’s a privilege just to be a person who’s been on a plane before. There’s so many rungs to privilege because it’s that idea of, you had a mom and you had family in Italy, for instance, and you had a mother who was interested in different parts of Europe. And so I think because of that, you can imagine it. You have the capacity to imagine it. Whereas I think when I was a young person, I didn’t know anybody who had ever traveled to Europe that was in my immediate family. I didn’t know anyone who had lived in a foreign country before. And I think that because of that, I didn’t ever think that that was something that I would do. You know, you just don’t have the vision for it. And that’s not to say that I wasn’t an extremely privileged person. I had well educated parents. I had them pushing me to learn. We both went to an amazing high school that was very hard and offered you the chance to learn a foreign language. And all of those are little advantages that you kind of don’t even take into account.
Tiffany
Yeah.
Katy
You know what I mean? Like this blogger you’re talking about had the vision that she could do it. And that comes from somewhere that doesn’t come from a vacuum.
Tiffany
Absolutely. I mean, and also just having, and I don’t know, like I said, I don’t remember who this was and I don’t obviously know her economic background, but I mean, you have to have some kind of economic stability to be able to think beyond your imminent survival. If you are growing up in extreme poverty, whether it’s in the first world or the third world, if you’re growing up in poverty, you do not have the privilege of thinking about dreams, really. I mean, there are a few rare exceptions of people who break out, but the vast majority of people, a lot of times as kids, are even having to help support the family, getting jobs as teenagers to support, you know, younger siblings or to help out a single parent. And they do not have the luxury of thinking, oh, my dream is x, Y or z.
Katy
Well, and not only that, like, they may have a totally different outlook in the sense that what if you’re raised rather than to pursue college, you’re raised that, you know, what you need to do is you need to get through this school and you need to get a job. And that is what you do. You get through the minimal amount of education and you get a job and you hold onto it for as long as you can and you help support the family. And that is just the vision. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not pursuing a dream, but that is the dream. You get out and you find a good job. So even being like, I’m going to get out of college and find a good job and I’m going to find that job over in a different country just because I want to.
Tiffany
Yes.
Katy
Not because I have to, but because I want to.
Tiffany
Because I want that fulfillment. I want that adventure. I mean, we’ve talked a lot on other topics about, especially in our expat versus immigrant conversations about, you know, what is it that makes the expat an expat default is always, it’s because they want an experience.
Katy
Yeah. And that they probably are going to go home eventually. Yeah. That it’s temporary.
Tiffany
Yes. But also that to do with this conversation, it’s a bonus. And I’m not, I don’t want to make light of being an expat, because it is a huge part of my life, and it has hugely changed so many aspects of my life. So it’s not just a bonus. It’s not just frosting on the cake or something like that, but it takes a certain level of privilege, luxury to be able to even consider going beyond having a successful life in your own country and wanting to do it in a foreign country, too.
Katy
And see, that’s the thing that people, when you talk about privilege, want to say. If you admit that you were privileged in your upbringing, and so that’s why you can live in Rome, suddenly people just jump to the conclusion that, now I’m saying that it wasn’t hard for you, and I think that’s why you have to take guilt out of it. And why this blogger is a little defensive is because I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for you to make it there. It’s just that you had a privilege to get there. I think that’s why you automatically see that defensive. Like, hold on. I am not privileged. I grew up poor. I walked 5 miles to school in the snow. You immediately get into that. What are you talking about? I had to work my butt off to stay in Rome. And you’re like, yeah, you did. And you also had a privilege to get there. They can both be true.
Tiffany
Yeah. I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to admit. I know how privileged I was and am. It doesn’t make me feel guilty. It makes me feel grateful, if anything. And it makes me feel extremely. I admire people who reached high levels of success without the privileges that I’ve had. And I’m. I’m in. I stand in awe of those people. I don’t know. I don’t see why it should cause guilt unless you have actively, like, tried to hold someone back. Why would you feel guilt about the fact that you had whatever amazing parents or you had? I mean, I think about the education that I got, and you were saying the same. I was so privileged to have that education.
Katy
Sure.
Tiffany
There are countries in the world where girls don’t get that.
Katy
Yeah. They don’t even get to go to school.
Tiffany
Yeah.
Katy
Setting the issue of privilege aside, though, when you get to the question of hard luck versus work, which we’re sort of treading into. Hard luck, sorry, hard work versus, yeah, hard luck versus good luck. Easy luck. Hard work versus luck, which I think we’re sort of treading into a little bit. I sometimes think of luck also as privilege in a sense. Let’s take the economics out of it entirely. Sometimes we just have these encounters that are sort of lucky. Like, for instance, let’s say, I know that part of the reason why you fell in love with Rome was the story A Room with a View, and somehow you got introduced to that movie, book, whatever it was. And sometimes I think of the luck of that, too. You end up with a teacher or a friend or a person on the street that just happens to mention something that you check out, and all of a sudden it changes the trajectory of your life. And I think that’s the little privileges that we all have in our lives, regardless of any kind of economics, is that we happen into different people with different ideas. And hopefully the luck comes. You happen into people with great ideas or people that somehow inadvertently point you in a direction that ends up being very important. Or like, you have a teacher who introduces you to a particular writer, and then you become obsessed with that writer, and that changes how you think about whatever. I mean, we all have these little things, you know? And that’s also kind of its own little sense of privilege. These people that come in and plant seeds along the way. I don’t know if that’s privilege or.
Tiffany
Luck, but, yeah, I never thought about that that way. In a sense, the words can be interchangeable, because when you think about just the privilege of birth, that’s luck. Where you’re born, who you’re born to. Unless you believe in reincarnation and the true meaning of karma, it’s complete luck where you’re born. Just the fact that we were born where we were born in a developed country is already a huge amount of luck. Privilege, whatever you want to call it. But those little things that come into your life. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could consider them privilege as well. Although to me, they seem more like luck, but. Or synchronicity. Again, is there a plan or isn’t there? Who knows?
Katy
Yeah. It’s kind of weird now that we’ve done this show for ages and ages now, since we’re almost. We’re halfway through college now, time wise. And how long have we been doing this program? It’s kind of difficult to remember how. How much more provincial I used to be when I met Derek, for instance, years and years ago, and I was looking for a change. I was looking for a wider view of life. But I remember him telling me about getting out of the military and literally shutting the door on his apartment in England and walking from there across France to the edge of Spain and then following the Camino all the way across that journey to Santiago. And I remember thinking, my God, how does some. How does somebody even think to do something like that? I can’t believe you actually did that. That’s nuts. And kind of both being jealous and amazed and also thinking, I could never do something like that because I had no experience. Even with traveling alone for any length of time, I had no experience. I had never been to Europe before. But I think about that, and then I think about when we’re talking about luck versus privilege or advantage or hard work, I think about that and jump forward to when this show starts and I’m living in Rome, and I do think of that as a bit of a combination of hard work and luck. And the luck comes in with, yes, Derek applied to be in a fellowship program that he got right, so he had to do the hard work of writing that application. But the luck feels like, for whatever reason, the program organizers that year, it was a program to study inter-religious dialogue for those of you who are just joining us. And it was a worldwide search, like scholars and students and everybody from all over the world could apply. And for whatever reason, that year, the organizers decided that they were going to pick a younger group than they had in years prior. They had always kind of picked people who were in their forties, fifties, sixties, and they were like, let’s try doing it with people who are in their twenties and thirties instead. And because of that, because of that heavy emphasis on young people, that was part of the reason why Derek made it into the cut, I think, of the worldwide group, the worldwide search. And that, to me, feels like a hint of luck. It wasn’t that he wasn’t qualified, he was totally qualified to do it, but that the organizers had decided that that year they were looking for young people. Feels like luck to me.
Tiffany
Oh, it’s totally lucky. I think there is luck in everything, and that doesn’t take away from the hard work. And I think that that’s the problem with people who— that’s the thing I don’t get about people who have this problem with talking about privilege. Just because you’re privileged does not mean that you also did not work really hard and that you’re not also really good at what you do. There’s luck, I think, in everything. Yeah, I’m sure. I mean, I think about my book getting published and I think about how I got my agent.
Katy
Yeah. Midnight in the Piazza, by the way.
Tiffany
If you’ve just joining us, thank you for that plug.
Katy
It’s a book for middle readers, a great adventure story.
Tiffany
Thank you.
Katy
Go ahead.
Tiffany
You know, I got my agent on Twitter. I talk about this on a mini episode in an event called Pit Mad, I think. Yeah, Pit mad it was called. And you tweet out your tagline. You tweet out, like, a pitch that has to be one tweet long. And this is back in the olden days of Twitter when it was half the length of what tweets can be now. And you tweet it out, you put in certain hashtags in there, and you hope that an agent sees it, and if they like it, they put a heart on it, and then that means you can query them. I think about that, and I think about how many thousands and thousands, because literally thousands of people participate in that. And when I did it, you could tweet twice an hour. We were not supposed to do it more than twice an hour. Now they say you can only do it twice in the whole event. Okay, so there were two tweets going out an hour for all these thousands and thousands of people. And my agent saw my tweet. You cannot tell me that there was not luck involved in that.
Katy
And yet you must have also crafted a really great sentence to pitch it.
Tiffany
Yeah, I’m sure I did. But, I mean, I don’t see how anyone could possibly achieve anything, whether it’s moving abroad, publishing a book, becoming the president of the United States, and say, I did this all by myself. Nobody helped me. There was no luck. There was no privilege involved. It was all my own work. It’s not possible.
Katy
Yeah. There were no mentors. Because how did the idea to even do it get put in your head?
Tiffany
Yeah.
Katy
You weren’t born being like, you know what? Coo coo, I’m gonna live in a foreign country someday, you know?
Tiffany
Exactly.
Katy
I’m gonna get as far away from where I currently am, and I’m gonna go live somewhere else.
Tiffany
Yeah.
Katy
I mean, the idea comes from something, and it could be a teacher. It could be something you read. It could be something you see. It could be an obsession with language. Whatever it is, you know.
Tiffany
Yes.
Katy
Comes from somewhere.
Tiffany
We all have so many encounters, and especially in our early childhood, I think that they make so much more of an impact when you’re little. You know, my mom had an obsession with french culture. She wasn’t, you know, she had Italian blood, but she was a francophile. And so we had foreign exchange students from France stay with us, and they invited us back. I mean, that’s a huge part of going to Paris and living in Paris for a month at age 16 with a french family. Huge part of what then led me to move abroad. I know so many people who move abroad because they studied. They did a year abroad in school, and they fell in love with the country and they had to move back. Don’t tell me that those people didn’t have privilege because those programs are freaking expensive or whatever it is. I think about Aurelio now, the things that he encounters just based on me and the things that I talk about, you know, I’m always talking about books. He laughs at me because I’m obsessed with books, you know, and he’ll tell on me. Now, if I get a book, he’ll be like, papa, mommy got another book. Jeez, kid. And, you know, you hope that those positive things like reading or whatever I offer to him at least will make a dent. But then, of course, you wonder as well about the negative things, because, of course, everyone has negative influences.
Katy
Sure.
Tiffany
That they pass on.
Katy
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even that. It’s funny. So if you listen to the mini episode last week, I was talking about my early days in Rome. After you shared your early days in Rome, you know, and obviously, I was not… I was having a hard go of it. Go back and listen to the episode, and you can see why. So regardless of luck oe privilege, it was hard for me to make that adjustment. But when I was going back and looking for notes about how was I feeling, I was looking at this notebook. If you listen to the episode, you know, it was a lot of complaining, but it was also that we were doing this program called The Artist’s Way, which is a book that’s supposed to help you recover your creativity by doing tons and tons and tons of exercises. And so I was encountering the exercises as I was going back and reading what the journal was. And one of those exercises was to write about people who, as an artist, those people who were encouraging to you and to write about them and why they were, what role they played. And also write about the people who stood in your way, if not actually stood in your way, said things that knocked you down a peg, whether they meant to or not. Because when we’re talking about that, we have positive imposes and we have negative ones, and the negative ones can also knock you, like, way off course, even just accidentally. And it was really interesting and hard to read about some of those people again, you know, and to remember so vividly. Oh, yes, yes. I remember when you said that to me, you know, like, I wrote about one guy that was an artist I very much admired, who I’m still friends with, who said to me once, like, I must have been sharing my ambition to do more writing and to be more of a radio host. And he said, oh, you don’t have the creativity to be anything but a radio producer.
Tiffany
Ouch.
Katy
Which, by the way, being a radio producer requires an incredible amount of creativity. So I don’t actually feel like he understood what the job was. So all of you radio producers out there, ignore that guy.
Tiffany
But is it someone I know? I’m just curious.
Katy
No, it’s not somebody you know.
Tiffany
All right.
Katy
Okay. But it’s not like he was trying to be mean. Although maybe.
Tiffany
Some people are mean, like, saying hurtful things like that to bring others down without even realizing it. It’s like something. Some subconscious thing in them. So who knows? I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna give him a pass.
Katy
Yeah, let’s not give him a pass. But, yeah, there’s those people, too, that you encounter. And how many of those you encounter also is, like, privilege, luck. And often, if you’re at a different socioeconomic scale, you encounter more negativity all the time.
Tiffany
Yeah, you encounter. I can see how in certain circles you’re going to encounter either people who have had really successful careers and have gone on to fulfill their dreams and do the things that they wanted to do. And those people can be very uplifting. They can also be very jaded, by.
Katy
The way, or jealous.
Tiffany
Yeah, those people can be jaded and jealous, and they can kind of not want to see the next person follow their footsteps. There are those people out there. But I think for the most part, most people who have had really fulfilling careers and lives, they want to help people who are coming up after them and or at least show, as an example, just show in their own lives. Like, this is what I did. I decided I was going to do this and do that, and I just did it. You know, whether or not they’re talking about you, you can see them as a model. Whereas if you’re in a different sort of circumstance, you know, you’re seeing people who, a, maybe didn’t even try or b, failed. You just don’t have the kind of models that you would have in a very academic situation or, you know, a privileged background. So, yes, that’s true, too.
Katy
Well, and sometimes, too, it’s hard to recognize how far you’ve come. Like, if we’re all on a ladder, let’s say, because we often, I think, think of ourselves on a ladder and whatever our profession is, we kind of know who’s above us. We sort of know who’s below us. You know, we definitely know who we would perceive as we’re competing with. Maybe. But that’s the thing. You’re always looking up the ladder, and we hardly ever look back at how far up the ladder you already came.
Tiffany
It’s so true.
Katy
Yeah. I had to teach a class to a radio class to a bunch of high schoolers late last year, and this is during the pandemic. Like, as far as I know, I’ve just been up in my office alone, you know, talking to you occasionally. And it wasn’t until I was talking to that class of teenagers where I thought, I thought, oh, my God, I really do know a lot. And I did come a long way, and I remember what it was like to be them and really want to work in radio and work in writing and be like, how do you even do that? And even that, I have an idea of how you do that now, is so much further up the ladder. And when you talk about privilege, in this case anyway, it’s just like, how far up the ladder are you? Just when you first launch as an adult, just by all the other people. It’s interesting to think about.
Tiffany
It is. Anyway, no, I wanted to honestly give a shout out to my mom. Not that she’s necessarily listening. I don’t know how often she listens to the show. She does occasionally. But when we were talking a little bit ago about depending on what family you’re born into, often you have examples you learn from, particularly your parents. And when I was in the States this summer, a couple of times talking to my mom, it just came up. And she doesn’t really dwell on her childhood a lot. She had a very difficult childhood. She had a very, very different childhood than I had. Extremely different. Her parents were very poor, completely uneducated. And I hope she doesn’t mind my saying, borderline abusive. And I remember just a couple times she said something like, my mom used to always say, patty, go do this. Patty, get me that. Patty or Pam, you know, her sister, Pam, get me that, give me this, get me that. Go do that, do this, do that. She’s like, we were our mom’s slaves. She was constantly telling us to do this, to do that. And she said, I hated that. And I remember when I had you girls, I said, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. And there was another example that she gave in a different conversation. Oh, yeah. My mom, my mom always did this thing, and I decided I wasn’t going to do that. And I think my mom is one of those rare people because I don’t think it happens all that often that somebody has the wherewithal and the self awareness to say, yeah, this is what I’m used to, but it’s not okay, and I’m not going to do that to my kids or to my whatever. Maybe it’s your employees. You know, you were treated terribly by a boss, but you decide as a boss to treat your employees better, or whatever it might be. Your student, you were treated terribly by a teacher, but you decide to change that for your own students.
Katy
Yeah. And to get really meta. If she didn’t do that in a vacuum, how did she decide that she was not going to do that? What were the other influences that made it possible for her to have that thought and to follow through with it?
Tiffany
I’ve wondered about this so many, so many times because my mom, she had such a different adult life than her two sisters did. Both of her sisters got pregnant in high school, and one of them became a business owner and did pretty well for herself. The other one lived most of her life in—I won’t say poverty, no, not poverty—but she lived a very hard life. Very difficult life. Challenging life. And my mother went on to live a very privileged life after becoming an adult. And not to say she didn’t work hard, because she worked incredibly hard, but she had a lot of luck, too. But I’ve often wondered, what was it? My mom, if you meet my mother, she comes across as being so cultured, and I believe that she is cultured. She loves theater. She took us to the theater when we were little girls. She thought to give me music lessons, you know, voice lessons. She put me in ballet. She offered us so much. She introduced us to so many different things that then we could choose what we loved to do. She started traveling as an adult. She never traveled as a child. I’ve always wondered, what is it about her? Where did she get that from? She did not go to university. She did not have the opportunity to go to university. There were no scholarships when she was at that age. You know, it was like you were saying, finish school and go to work and send money home to your parents. That was her young adult life. But somehow she pulled out of it. And I, and I’ve always wondered how.
Katy
Well, maybe you’ll have to do a little interview with her.
Tiffany
Yeah, maybe I will.
Katy
And find out.
Tiffany
I’ve always wanted to interview her. My father was to thank for a lot of the more financial benefits, say, but culture is not so closely linked to economics. Like, you can be filthy rich and, you know, have no culture or vice versa. So it wasn’t just marrying my father and all of that. There was something else, and I’ve never been able to quite figure out what it was.
Katy
Well, I smell a mini episode here. I don’t know if she’ll want to come on the show or not, but it would be interesting.
Tiffany
Yeah, maybe.
Katy
Maybe.
Tiffany
I’m sure I could convince her.
Katy
Yeah. I mean. I mean, a shout out to both of our parents for all of the advantages they gave us.
Tiffany
For sure.
Katy
We got lucky.
Tiffany
We did.
Katy
We have good parents.
Tiffany
We really did.
Katy
All right, well, we should probably leave it there even though we could go on and on. I have plenty of other ideas, but I’d be happy and delighted to hear from our listeners, too, what they make of hard work versus luck and this larger conversation of privilege, separating privilege out from guilt, which is what often people jump to, you know, that defensiveness of. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can always email us at bittersweetlifepodcast@gmail.com.
Tiffany
You can also find us on social media. We are on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Just search for The Bittersweet Life podcast and you’ll find us.
Katy
Yes. Good topic idea. Good topic idea. We almost ended up more in talking about privilege than we did about hard work versus luck. But maybe that just means we get to have an ongoing conversation about this.
Tiffany
I think there’s a lot more to.
Katy
Explore here, for sure. Well, and until next time, this is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy civil.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany parks.
Katy
And support for The Bittersweet Life comes from our listeners this week. I want to thank Gracie and Mark, Rebecca and Yula, Gabby and Marie. Thank you so much for your support. We couldn’t do this show without you, and it’s not too late to join. Find us on Patreon or PayPal and sign up to be a monthly donor. There are links in the show notes, or you can find ways to donate at www.thebittersweetlife.net. Okay, bye. Talk to you soon.
