“Giving Up” Is The Essential Idea Of Them All – Traditions 6-12

From The Language of the Heart: Bill W’s Grapevine Writings page 93;

“In each Tradition, the individual or the group is asked to give up something for our general welfare.”

• Tradition Six points at the corroding influence of money, property, and personal authority; it begs that we keep these influences at a minimum by separate incorporation and management of our special services. It also warns against the natural temptation to make alliances or give endorsements.
  
• Tradition Seven states that we had best pay our own bills; that large contributions or those carrying obligations ought not be received; that public solicitation using the name Alcoholics Anonymous is positively dangerous.
  
• Tradition Eight forswears professionalizing our Twelfth Step work but it does guarantee our few paid service workers an unquestioned amateur status.
  
• Tradition Nine asks that we give up all idea of expensive organization; enough is needed to permit effective work by our special services – and no more. This Tradition breathes democracy; our leadership is one of service and it is rotating; our few titles never clothe their holders with arbitrary personal authority; they hold authorizations to serve, never to govern.
  
• Tradition Ten is an emphatic restraint of serious controversy; it implores each of us to take care against committing AA to the fires of reform, political or religious dissension.
  
• Tradition Eleven asks, in our public relations, that we be alert against sensationalism and it declares there is never need to praise ourselves. Personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film is urgently required, thus avoiding the pitfall of vanity, and the temptation through broken anonymity to link AA to other causes.
  
• Tradition Twelve, in its mood of humble anonymity, plainly enough comprehends the preceding eleven.

The pitfall of vanity… “Excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements.”