One of my favourite pieces is the foreword to the second edition. The foreword is a part of a book that I almost never read and it took me a few years to get onto this.
It gives great hope, talking about recovery rates at a time when the fellowship was big enough for the program to have established its credibility, yet small enough for the writers to have a good idea how things were going. It is pretty much a report on the results of publishing the first edition.
Yet there is more inspiration to be had by looking at the growth of the fellwoship. from 100 or so to over 150,000 between 1939 and 1955, just 16 years if memory serves. The bulk of this growth was one alcoholic talking to another, using the book as a guide, though there were many instances of people finding relief initially just through the book.
If you care to sit down with a pencil and paper and play with some numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that the members must have been incredibly active in helping others. They couldn't sit around and wait a year or two till they were ready, the demand was too great.
The two stand out elements seem to be a high degree of activity working with others, and a high degree of success in recovery. I wonder if there is a lesson there.