ANST - awards as goals

[Dennis and Dory Grace]

Fox wrote:
> At this time I do not have
>the drive to be a excelling peer, I believe the best I can
>currently acheive is court Baron. 

Sorry Fox, don't mean to pick on you here; you just happened to say the
sort of thing I've heard a few others say before and I wanted to comment.

How does one "achieve" a court barony? For that matter, how does one
actually "achieve" a Peerage? I've heard of people setting goals for
themselves of achieving one award or another, and while I don't really have
any problem with that, I wonder at it nonetheless. 

I never set out to achieve a Laurel. Being a landed baroness wasn't
something I ever even thought about doing until our founding baron came to
us and told us they were stepping down and thought we'd do a good job. I
never made a Pelican as a goal, though I actually let myself hope for one
right before we were elevated. In fact, other than there being a couple of
awards that I thought would be cool to have, I never set a goal to achieve
any of them. (I did set a goal to win Kingdom A&S one year and I did, but
that's a competition, and so a different animal than an award.) I just made
goals of reaching for  X % higher quality in my next scroll; I made goals
of autocratting the most interesting event of the year or providing the
coolest feast and making enough profits so the barony could buy whatever
the next big thing on the wishlist was. I made a goal of making an even
cooler piece of garb for myself than the last one was. These were things I
would have done anyway, because they're my idea of fun and that's just the
way my brain works (frightening, isn't it? the thought of my brain working,
that is ;-> ). 

I can see where making an award a goal is just one more way for a person to
provide their individual goals with a kind of external structure or
direction. So when I hear folks talking about others being too concerned
with awards and saying that  Ld. X is doing something just to get an award,
I say, so what? If someone's done the work, you give them the recognition
appropriate to it, whether it was a totally self-less act of love for one's
group or an undying need to feed one's ego. Hey, if the toilets are clean,
the toilets are clean, despite the mindset of the person doing it (besides,
who among us is going to take on the job of thought police? No, Conor, you
can't. ;-> ).

Peerage, on the other hand, is not an award, it is a position and a job,
and any candidate needs to be fully qualified to fill the position. As
well, in my own humble opinion, as a Peer is someone for people to look up
to, a Peer ideally is a hero of sorts. So rather than striving toward
achieving a Peerage, I think it much more appropriate to strive to *be* a
Peer, to *be* a hero (which is one reason why I really love the proposed
motto for the Southern Region "as heros do").

Aw, geez. You see what happens when I'm not addressing rhetorical arguments
or punning? I just ramble on. 

Aquilanne
only 9 more ounces of coffee to go before I hit full operating capacity



============================================================================
Go to http://www.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.