This past week, one of my favorite high school teachers passed away. Let me be more specific, he was not one of my favorite teachers while I was actually in high school, as he rode me like a rented mule, but once I graduated over the years we became good friends. Why this is relevant to this weekend’s article is because his passing reminded me of the quote that was emblazoned behind his desk:
“失望并不是从未达到目标的结果，失望是永远没有目标”。
This got me thinking about what goals I have now as well as those I once had in the hobby, as well as what goals other hobbyists might have. So my goal in this article is to stimulate people to think about having goals above just setting up a tank. This may sound simple or contrived, but I have come to realize that I am much more successful when I am striving to reach a goal rather than when I am simply completing a task. So hopefully if I can show the value of having goals other hobbyists will see the benefit as well.
Looking back when only a few of us were actually trying to keep corals in our “mini-reefs”, we were considered crazy by the majority of people in the saltwater aquarium hobby. Back then we had one simple goal: keep whatever you had alive, even if it was something seemingly simple like Caulerpa or a sponge let alone the hard-to-get coral.
现在，这听起来可能不像是一个非常崇高的目标，但是那时我们实际上必须制作自己的设备，因为没有有用的蛋白质撇渣器，高强度照明系统，甚至像溢出盒和污水池一样简单。因此，我们大多数人试图做到这一点的一个简单目标都知道，我们分享了我们遇到的少数成功和许多失败。
幸运的是这种共享导致更好的和更好的husbandry of the easy to keep corals like leather corals, star polyps and mushroom corals, so that the number of people doing this gradually increased. Over time, and actually now looking back a relatively short time, the goal of most hobbyists was to expand our knowledge and keep more and more difficult animals alive.
First it was the true large-polyped stony corals like Bubble corals, Elegance Corals andEuphyllia。然后，目标成为保持真正的礁石石质珊瑚的活力Acropora，MontiporaandPocillopora。现在听起来可能很疯狂，但是大约20年前，公共水族馆的许多董事实际上认为，由于那时，公共水族馆在保持珊瑚方面几乎没有成功，因此不应允许业余爱好者保留这些珊瑚。
Fortunately, many of us in the hobby did not pay them attention and continued to spend our money buying and losing corals while we set our sights on unraveling the puzzle of keeping these corals alive. I am convinced that since it was a goal, rather than a series of tasks, this is why we were able to succeed.
That is, there was no coral cookbook at that time which said ‘if you did this and added that’ you would always succeed. Instead there were dozens if not hundreds of individuals each striving to reach the goal of getting these corals not only to survive, but also thrive and grow and eventually reproduce. This is also probably why even today there is not one perfect way to keep a reef tank.
On the good side, this allows anyone and everyone to tinker and manipulate things just a little bit to make each of their tanks unique and their own. However it also allows for a lot of flaming and derision when someone promotes or supports something that is seemingly out of the mainstream or differs from how one of the “experts” does it.
Even after 30 years most of us who have been in the hobby this long will still admit that we make stupid mistakes and that we lose things by being dumb or lazy and that more than anything one of our goals still is to learn. I do not write these articles to educate myself as I have never learned anything new from my own words or writing, but rather they give me the opportunity to talk with many of my fellow hobbyists and learn from them and then pass the information on. And to be honest, some of what I hear is brilliant and some of it is not as well thought out, but to me the goal is still to learn to be the best at this I can, so it is worth listening to all of it.
因此，由于我们所有人的一个简单目标，因为开始并没有真正改变：一切都活着，无论您只是设置第一个坦克还是现在，还要考虑其他一些目标和更大的坦克。首先，此后最重要的应该不是在爱好中浪费金钱。这种爱好中的所有事情似乎都变得越来越昂贵，这听起来很困难，但是浪费金钱与花钱不同。
To me, wasting money is buying the same species of fish or corals multiple times and thinking that you can keep it alive and not learning from your mistakes, or being too stubborn to ask someone and then having to replace it. Or buying the cheaper piece of equipment that lasts six months or does not do what it is supposed to do and replacing it several times.
当目标不浪费钱时，由个人决定做功课，看看是否可以将鱼保存在他们提供的储罐中，或者其他人是否在特定设备上遇到问题。在这方面，互联网是对劣质设备或良好往绩不佳的鱼类的宽容。因此，这是我们可以互相帮助的共同目标。
Similarly we also want our corals and fish to thrive and grow. However, now it is possible to have the goal of propagating fish or corals and trying to break even in the hobby. I say break even rather than make money, as I am trying to set up a realistic goal, as unfortunately very few hobbyists selling frags or breeding fish actually make money doing so, so at best the goal should be not to lose money. This goal is also good for the hobby as it allows for rare one of a kind coral to be spread to many hobbyists, rather than being held by one individual for whom it eventually dies and thus is lost to the hobby.
In the same manner, the passion and compulsiveness of hobbyists is what produced many of the breeding techniques and successes in spawning and raising saltwater fish that is now taken for granted. There are still literally hundreds of fish that we would like to keep in the hobby so another goal of hobbyists can be the breeding of these fish, some of which are incredibly rare and expensive. So if any of you are successful at breedingDebeliusor国王的神仙鱼由于阅读了本文，请记住我的后代。这是个玩笑，我知道我会因为这样说而被某人燃烧。
As I said, we still do not know all we need to know to be totally successful, so another goal for hobbyists would be to try new things. Twenty years ago I tried and wrote about Miracle Mud and while I have gotten a fair amount of grief about it over the years, I still use it and have been thanked by countless hobbyists over the years for bringing it to their attention. There are lots of other techniques and products out there that I’m guessing could also help in the hobby, so if you find something that works, bring it to people’s attention.
I currently am running six tanks, but the goal is not just to have 6 tanks, but a couple of them are experimental tanks that I try new things in, rather than experimenting on my 300 gallon tank that if it crashed would bring me to tears. So if your goal is to try new things, then setting up one or a few experimental tanks may be the ticket.
尽管我上面提到的目标对于爱好中的每个人来说都是值得的，但业余爱好者也可以探索其他几个目标。如果这样做一段时间后，您发现这是您的激情，就像我们许多人一样，您可以尝试从事它的职业。
从在批发商或LFS中工作，将其提升到一个全新的水平并为收藏家或一些水产养殖或杂种设施工作，有很多方法可以做到这一点。甚至还有大胆的一步开设自己的商店，我计划在将来的作品中谈论。现在，随着这种爱好的增长速度，您不应局限于业余爱好的目标。
当朋友通过时，我们经常回顾他们给我们的东西，并记住他们所做的好事。对于我的朋友，我记得他传达了总是有目标并一直朝着他们努力的概念。在这方面，我在业余爱好中的目标一直是尽可能多地学习并分享我所学到的知识，让我喜欢看和工作的坦克，并尝试保持竞争性的性质the hobby a number’s game. Hopefully I have provided some incentive to have goals in the hobby more than just having the most posts online, but to actually do something that helps the hobby continue to flourish.
