Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP TWELVE

and ability. The result was the same—all of us had nearly
perished in a sea of alcohol.

But today, in well-matured A.A.'s, these distorted drives
have been restored to something like their true purpose and
direction. We no longer strive to dominate or rule those about
us in order to gain self-importance. We no longer seek fame
and honor in order to be praised. When by devoted service
to family, friends, business, or community we attract wide-
spread affection and are sometimes singled out for posts of
greater responsibility and trust, we try to be humbly grateful
and exert ourselves the more in a spirit of love and service.
True leadership, we find, depends upon able example and
not upon vain displays of power or glory.

Still more wonderful is the feeling that we do not have to
be specially distinguished among our fellows in order to be
useful and profoundly happy. Not many of us can be lead-
ers of prominence, nor do we wish to be. Service, gladly
rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted
or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or
in the world outside we are partners in a common effort,
the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human be-
ings are important, the proof that love freely given surely
brings a full return, the certainty that we are no longer
isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety
that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but
can fit and belong in God's scheme of things—these are
the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living
for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap
of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes. True
ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is