I did an interview last month for the first time in a while. It’s a niche magazine someone referred me to. (http://voyagemia.com/interview/meet-charlie-charlotte-hudson-charlie-hudson-writes-homestead/?fbclid=IwAR1wsIV1PChdlwrK9DzTU61B5f8KBczTM6zlfwnnGAlrCzXxtO89jR9YQTI)

Yes, I know it’s a long link, but I didn’t do a  shortcut. Anyway, they had a couple of interesting questions about did good luck play a part in my careers and did I encounter bad luck? As I said to them, I think everyone has a mix of both. (I won’t go into the tragedy part most of us face at some point or the other). As I have posted before, the path I wound up on in the Army was certainly not one I expected. Had I not been the first female officer assigned to my unit in Germany, I would not have been placed in the position that I was; a position that then led to other “female firsts”. For a time, I thought I wasn’t performing to the level I should have been and come to find out, I was beating everyone’s expectations. To be clear that was, “Yes, she makes a lot of mistakes, but never the same one twice.” It wasn’t that I had been put into the higher level position in order to “try” me; it was they simply weren’t sure what to do with me. The lessons I learned there provided a stronger foundation for what I would go on to do later. On the “bad luck” side, in my very next assignment, I was once again placed in a difficult position and three of my four senior officers were quite frankly enough to cause me to want to resign as soon as my service obligation was over. My direct boss was fortunately the exception. Within about four months though, the other three left in the normal way these things happen and all three that came in were the opposite side of the coin. While one was a bit of a screamer, I was used to that. They were all the kind of officers one could look up to and learn from.