FredL

Crris, back in my days in IT, I had a consultant from IBM who became my good friend tell me, "An expert is nothing but an ordinary guy with a brief case more than 50 miles from home.". This was a quote I loved so much that I used it myself on several speaking engagements of my own. It pretty much summed up our attiude towards "experts" back in my IT days and is an attitude I've carried over into other areas of my life, perhaps inapproprately. It is, however, an attitude that helps explain the huge success of Information Technology over the past few decades and why the US was such a uniquely favorable environment for it to develop in.

Now, Bonsai is not IT, but maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe if more people were willing to just get out and give it a try and thought of it as being primarily for their own private and personal enjoyment rather than as a kind of cult activity that has to be done "the right way", we'd be making alot more progress with it, at least here in the US. Maybe it needs to be demystified more and people given the attitude, "sure you can do it. It's not really so hard!", rather than the attitude that they can't really understand it without 20 years of total immersion and can't trust their own judgement in regard to what is beautiful and what is not.

I've been given lots of advice from people who are without question "experts". Certainly in THEIR minds, what with their years of experience and investigation. Yet, alot of their advice was directly contrary to what I found worked for me. Exactly the same as what I found in my IT days. And, I might add, the same was true back in my days at Rutgers, trying to understand what the "Art Appreciation" Professors were trying to teach me. I think the best advice is, "To thine own self be true" and take what the "experts" have to say with a grain of salt.

Best regards, Fred