This is what the LTER program is all about. To manage is to direct, to shift, to drive, that is, to urge, to move along. That is exactly what we data managers do, sometime successfully, sometimes not as much. This is a process, and all process require time. As one experience that process sometimes one succeed.
Success is just an end of a stage that has been thoroughly experienced.
It only means you begin another one. If one is not conscious of that new beginning and starts that new stage without focus one is doomed to fail. It is then when losing is a way of winning, one wins experience, hence becoming wiser. This document is a summary of all the wisdom I have obtained in the last eleven years as the LUQ LTER Data Manager, but I must confess most of that wisdom has been obtained in the past few weeks. The review of our last LTER proposal astonished me as mush as it did to everybody else in our site.