is a librarian. She spends all day, every work day, helping the university she works for to provide the best training she can, from her area of specialty. And she is VERY good at her job.

One of the factors of her job is a well-known situation called “publish or perish” – where if you are working for a non-private university and are faculty, you are required to publish to help the university improve it’s standing among all the universities. She has worked within that environment for the last 15 years, and has steadily improved her standing to reach the highest faculty standing she could hold without ever having to re-apply for it. Several times she has achieved an annual review rating of her performance as “Excellent” – which brought her the highest pay raise available to any faculty member that was available in that year.

This morning she told me that she’d had an idea for a presentation on the local campus for assisting new and experienced faculty to improve their applications for tenure or promotion, based on a new approach to gathering statistics to support the application. Not only was the presentation well received, but a former co-worker suggested she submit the concept to a national conference. The challenge, from her point of view, is that presentations to that conference have an INTERNATIONAL audience. She was, mildly, freaking out – because she’d just found out that her proposal to that conference had been accepted.

So, I walked up to her, put my arms around her, and while hugging her I reminded her of one of the teachings I learned from L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings. “The right person to assign the job of fixing a problem is the first one to realize that there is a problem.” She identified the problem, worked out the solution, and had already successfully presented it on the local level. She owns this. And if it happens to lead to international recognition, so be it. She earned it.