On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, S. Hieber wrote:
One problem is that, if you have to prompt them to propose, whoever they may be, how well will they do the really hard parts without lots of prompting. . .? Enthusiasm is no substitute for resources or organizational and leadership skills, but I think it's a necessary element.
That is true, but consider this anecdote: In early 1993 I started going to our local fish club's monthly meetings, off and on. Always sat in the back, didn't really talk to anyone. At the end of the year meeting, one of the club long-timers, a nice little old lady, came over and said hi, and talked to me at length about the plants I was playing with, and convinced me to write an article by the end of the meeting. By the next month, they'd suckered me into doing a program, and a year and a half later, I'd run the plant auction, started the website, written 4-5 articles, revived the HAP program, and was now president of the club. It was basically the same with the AGA; I was just a Joe schmoe member until Neil and Karen asked me to help out.
In a similar vein, Cheryl was sitting around for a year or two as Mary's lackey in production, not even comfortable correcting Mary's typos ("Tropical Aquarium Plants", remember that one Cheryl!), until we asked if she'd like to "stick around". We had NO idea how good she actually was.
I think that a lot of people need encouragement and cannot be 100% self-starting, even the ones who turn out to be rabid self-starters given the opportunity. & Who knows, maybe SFBAPS or SVAS is waiting for the AGA to ask them... that's all I'm saying.
- Erik -- Erik Olson erik at thekrib dot com _______________________________________________ AGA-mcm mailing list AGA-mcm@thekrib.com http://lists.thekrib.com/mailman/listinfo/aga-mcm