1. We admitted we were powerless over nothing. We could manage our lives perfectly and we could manage those of anyone else that would allow it.
2. Came to believe that there was no power greater than ourselves, and the rest of the world was insane.
3. Made a decision to have our loved ones and friends turn their wills and their lives over to our care.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of everyone we knew.
5. Admitted to the whole world at large the exact nature of their wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to make others straighten up and do right.
7. Demanded others to either "shape up or ship out".
8. Made a list of anyone who had ever harmed us and became willing to go to any lengths to get even with them all.
9. Got direct revenge on such people whenever possible except when to do so would cost us our own lives, or at the very least, a jail sentence.
10. Continued to take inventory of others, and when they were wrong promptly and repeatedly told them about it.
11. Sought through nagging to improve our relations with others as we couldn't understand them at all, asking only that they knuckle under and do things our way.
12. Having had a complete physical, emotional, and spiritual breakdown as a result of these steps, we tried to blame it on others and to get sympathy and pity in all our affairs.

The Big Book Recovery Program (thru page 164) is about learning to live on God's terms, not ours. "Accepting life on life's terms" is an opinion from a story, not part of The Program. "Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us." pg 77. Life doesn't make terms; other people and my EGO make terms. So my choices are: other's terms, my EGO's terms, or GOD's terms?
We can't change the past, but we CAN "accept, change, or eliminate" what needs to be––with God's help. We ask God to direct our thinking and actions. The Serenity Prayer suggests we ask for wisdom to know what CAN and should be changed; and we don't waste energy trying to accept those things that need to be changed.

The date was June 10, 1935 – the date that Dr. Bob had his last drink.
But that didn't satisfy today's historians. They tinkered with dates and concluded that Dr. Bob didn't have his last drink on June 10th, that the medical convention to which he went in Atlantic City never occurred when AAs said it did, and that A.A. was founded on some other date thereabouts.
Long after A.A. was founded, Lois Wilson wrote that it had been founded in 1934 when drunks were coming to the Wilson home in Brooklyn. Others wanted to date it when Ebby Thacher first carried the message to Bill Wilson. T. Henry Williams often said that A.A. started right on the carpet of his Palisades home in Akron when Dr. Bob, Henrietta Seiberling, and the others in the Oxford Group knelt and prayed for Dr. Bob's recovery.
Still others like to date it as of the publishing of the Big Book in the Spring of 1939. Clarence Snyder claimed he was the founder, and that the first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous was held in Cleveland on May 11, 1939.One would-be expert has now asserted that the "original" program occurred some time after that in the 1940s. And, Bill Wilson made the statement that the first A.A. group began when A.A. Number Three was cured of alcoholism, was visited by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob in the hospital, and walked from there a "free man" – never to drink again. That happened very shortly after Dr. Bob himself got sober.
Personally, I'm convinced that A.A. began. I am convinced it began at Dr. Bob?s Home in Akron. I am convinced that Bob and Bill agreed that it began when Dr. Bob took his last drink. I'm convinced that fairly soon after AA began, Bill and Bob agreed that the founding date was June 10, 1935. And thereafter, Bill Wilson attended and actually spoke at "Founders Day" each year in Akron where the "founding of A.A." on June 10, 1935 is celebrated.

What had once been a simple program taking a few hours evolved into a complicated burden that overwhelmed many newcomers to sobriety.
It was while researching his first book, "But For the Grace of God," which deals with the explosive growth of AA in the 1940s, that Wally learned about AA's Beginners' "Classes." What he found during his research, conducted in the spring of '93 in Washington, D.C., was a 20 page pamphlet published in 1944 that described Beginners' "Classes" then being taught in the nation's capital. Wally's own sponsor had attended similar classes in the early '50s.
..."We lose them between 90 days and a year." says Wally, who adds that 50 years ago, many AA groups were claiming a 75 % success rate. By comparison, a study of 227 alcoholics published in the Sept. 12, 1991, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine showed a 16% recovery rate among AA members during a 24 month period. Besides getting members onto a fast track 12 step program, AA meetings of 50 years ago also stressed God much more than is done today, says Wally. "When the treatment centers turned into moneymaking operations, that's when the spirituality went out the window," says Wally. "They tried to convert a spiritual program into a psychological program."
...alcohol treatment facilities, (are) financed by insurance company plans. As a result, he says, medical and psychological approaches pushed out the more traditional AA tenets that called for total surrender to a higher power, coupled with service to others. Wally is trying to bring the spiritual values back to AA.

"Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Is it about telling jokes, frequently 'off-color'? ...about enjoying telling our war stories as fun & games? ...about not taking The Program seriously? ...about being so concerned with "official rules" that we forget that the newcomers' life depends on us carrying the life-saving message? Or is it about keeping a check on our egos – personally and as a group, and that every AA Group has the right to be wrong?

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from Aurthur Sheehan, AA Historian link to AAHistoryLovers Group
The 12&12 essay on Tradition 4 has a story about an early group that had grandiose plans that predictably fell flat and went down to failure. But it had a happy ending. The story is about "Rule # 62" which is "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." A group in early 1940 supposedly had 61 rules for their group. Then the group decided to involve itself in just about everything and anything. ...(eventually) confusion reigned supreme. The power-driver promoter and members finally reached the point where they wished they had paid attention to AA experience when first advised of it. And, upon admitting defeat in a letter sent to the NY office, out of this was born the famous rule #62: "Don't take yourself too damn seriously."
The 12&12 states that under Tradition 4 an AA group had exercised its right to be wrong. It also did a service to AA by letting others know what it did wrong and being willing to take the hard lessons they had learned and apply them in a humble and good-natured manner. Even the chief architect and super-promoter, standing in the ruins of his dream, could laugh at himself. Bill W described that as the very acme (high point) of humility.
Every group has the right to be wrong and is free to work out its own customs, meeting formats, service structure and many other things. But freedom also requires responsibility otherwise it becomes anarchy. Each group is responsible to avoid any action that might harm others, whether it's AA's common good, another group or a member. And there have been such actions, or this Tradition would be unnecessary. ...The experienced group understands that the Traditions are not technicalities. They are proven guides that reinforce the primary purpose of all AA groups and a way to maintain group harmony and unity.

The story (of the "superpromoter") is discussed in the 12&12 essay on Tradition 4, in "AA Comes of Age" and in the book "Not God." So it seems grounded on experience. The book "Not God" (pg 107) states 1940 as the year of the promoter sobering up and the incident and correspondence. Bill W states in "AA Comes of Age" (pgs 103-106) that the letter and card sent in by the super promoter was explicit to the notion in Tradition 4 that each group has the right to be wrong.

Gresham’s Law — that bad currency drives out good — has been operative in the life of the Twelve-Step Programs. Weak practice of the Program is tending to drive out strong practice of the Program.

There are three ways to practice the Twelve-Step Program. (1) The strong, original way — proved powerfully and reliably effective over seventy-two years. (2) A medium way — not so strong, not so safe, not so sure, not so good, but still effective. And (3) a weak way, which turns out to be really no way at all but literally a heresy, a false teaching, a twisting and corruption of what the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous clearly stated the Program to be.

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AA existed for four full years before the Steps were put in their final written form. During that time there was a Program, and it was sobering up alcoholics. It consisted of two parts: a six-step word-of-mouth Program, and the Four Absolutes — absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love — taken over from the Oxford Group, the evangelical Christian movement out of which AA was born. The six steps of the word-of-mouth Program from the early pioneering years of Alcoholics Anonymous as given in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age are: 1. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol. 2. We made a moral inventory of our defects or sins. 3. We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in confidence. 4. We made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking. 5. We tried to help other alcoholics with no thought of reward in money or prestige. 6. We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice these precepts.
In those early days of AA (1935-1939) there was no talk of suggestions. The basic points of the Program, especially the word-of-mouth Program, were regarded by all the older members as directives, as indispensable essentials, and were passed on to newcomers as such.

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By 1941 (which was the year my father, Tom P., Sr., came into the Fellowship) it was possible to distinguish three variant practices of the AA Program, which we have labeled the strong-cup-of-tea, medium-cup-of-tea, and weak-cup-of-tea approaches. Strong AA was the original, undiluted dosage of the spiritual principles. Strong AAs took all twelve of the Steps — and kept on taking them. They did not stop with the admission of powerlessness over alcohol, but went on right away to turn their wills and lives over to God’s care. They began to practice rigorous honesty in all their affairs. In short order they proceeded to take a moral inventory; admit all their wrongs to at least one other person; take positive and forceful action in making such restitution as was possible for those wrongs; continue taking inventory, admitting their faults, and making restitution on a regular basis; pray and meditate every day; go to two or more AA meetings weekly; and actively work the Twelfth Step, carrying the AA message to others in trouble.

The medium AAs started off with a bang, pretty much like the strong AAs, except they hedged or procrastinated a bit on parts of the Program that they feared or did not like — maybe the God Steps, maybe the inventory Steps, depending on their particular nervousness or dislikes. But after they had stayed sober for a while, the medium AAs eased up and settled into a practice of the Program that went something like this: an AA meeting a week; occasional Twelfth Step work (leaving more and more of that to the “newer fellows” as time went on); some work with the Steps (but not like before); less and less inventory (as they became more and more “respectable”); some prayer and meditation still, but not on a daily basis any more (“not enough time,” due to the encroachment of business engagements, social activities, and other baggage that went along with the return to normal life in the workaday world).

The weak AAs were a varied lot. Common to the weak approach everywhere was that it left out big chunks of the Program totally and permanently. Sometimes it was the God Steps, sometimes the inventory Steps, often both. Weak AAs tended to talk like this: “All you need to do to stay sober is go to meetings and stay away from the first drink.” Most of the weak AAs who were successful in staying sober were pretty faithful meeting-goers. Since they were doing so little with the principles, their sobriety and their survival depended more exclusively than did those of the strong and medium AAs on constant exposure to the people of AA.

Spelled out as such, the Four Absolutes are not a formal part of our AA philosophy of life. Since this is true, some may claim the Absolutes should be ignored. This premise is approximately as sound as it would be to suggest that the Bible should be scuttled.
The Absolutes were borrowed from the Oxford Group Movement back in the days when our society was in its humble beginning. In those days our founders and their early colleagues were earnestly seeking for any and all sources of help to define and formulate suggestions that might guide us in the pursuit of a useful, happy, and significant sober life.
Because the Absolutes are not specifically repeated in our Steps or Traditions, some of us are inclined to forget them. Yet in many old time groups where the solid spirit of our fellowship is so strongly exemplified, the Absolutes receive frequent mention. Indeed, you often find a set of old placards, carefully preserved, which are trotted out for
prominent display each meeting night. There could be unanimity on the proposition that living our way of life must include not only an awareness but a constant striving toward greater achievement in the qualities which the Absolutes represent. Many who have lost the precious gift of sobriety would ascribe it to carelessness in seeking these objectives. If you will revisit the Twelve Steps with care, you will find the Four Absolutes form a thread which is discernible in a sober life of quality, every step of the glorious journey.

We walked into this large group of which we had heard so much, but had never attended. From the vestibule we saw a placard on the corner of the far wall which said "Easy Does IT". We turned left to park our coat. We turned back and there on the other corner of the same wall was a twin placard which said, "First Things First". Then facing to the front of the room, high above the platform we saw in the largest letters of all, "But for the Grace of God". Then as our eyes descended, there directly on the front of the podium was another with four words, "Honesty, Unselfishness, Purity, and Love". In the next ten minutes as we sat unnoticed in the last row waiting for the meeting to start, many thoughts tumbled through a mind that was really startled by this first face to face meeting with the four Absolutes for a very long time.

Read the FULL article at Hindsfoot.org

Link to Al-Anon Suffolk Information Service