The 12th Denticle

Congratulations!

I’m with you on staying the course and being patient. It may not be worth the effort to completely abandon or derail your other projects because like you said, you’re not guaranteed to hold on to the title. There will always be someone out there with just as much determination as you and perhaps, deeper pockets. And before you know it, you may end up in the ugly cycle of trying to be number one by constantly upgrading your coins.

I’m competitive, and like you, want to defend a title. I only have a handful of sets, and I am mainly focused on one—the Philippine silver commemoratives of 1947-1999 (circulation issues). Like your Netherlands 10G set, this one has attained number one consecutively since day one. Additionally, the effort I put into this set paid off when it received a Best Presented Set award. But I know that one day someone else will unseat me. When I started the set, there were only about five competing sets in that category. I had the distinction of having some of the first top pops in many of the set’s coins, which were practically all self-submitted. But as the years went by, the sets in the category ballooned (30 at last count) and slowly but surely, new or existing set owners started adding coins that matched, or in some cases, unseated my top pop coins. At first that bothered me, but eventually I realized that the coins in my set are special to me: From being hand-picked purchases to self-submittals for encapsulation (and all of the waiting in between), these coins are a labor of love, top pop or not.

So now, whenever I start to get the urge to “compete,” I simply remind myself that I am collecting coins, not points. And that am doing so because I enjoy the hobby and want to share my coins with the community.

So yeah, chose the better path—stay focused on your goals, and enjoy your hobby!

BTW, belated Happy Birthday to your son Ben, and congratulations on 6 years of parenting!

Congratulations! The hard work and dedication that you put into presenting your winning sets is evident when viewing them, and your proud look in the pics sums it up  Looking forward to your next projects, and keep on writing these journals!  

Not only did the text editors/word processors auto correct the word, MY BRAIN auto corrected that word big time--and I've seen your award winning set title lots of times! And yeah, I kept reading it as "casualties"

I recall reading somewhere that as long as the first and last letters of the word are correct and the other letters of the word are there, that even if they're mixed up, our brains can make sense of them quickly. Must be true  

This is a very nice and interesting set. You said, 

“This is a set that I built simply because I like them and the history around them.”

Sometimes that’s all you need. Congratulations!