I’m pretty good at converting information I gather into actuality. Prior knowledge doesn’t obsoletize experience, but it’s valuable to guide you how that experience should be gathered, and it may just prevent you from internalizing bad form. In a sports context, unsupervised training can be quite damaging, especially in the beginning. It’s easy to pick something up the wrong way, but it’s very difficult to unlearn that in favor of propriety after the damage is done.

I get your point, though, of course. You want to prevent people from running into conformity, preventing themselves from experiencing and finding their own uniqueness, and I agree with that. But I do think that you can have both, and I actually think that learning from others will get you there faster, if you’re careful not to outsource any thinking and creative work.

So, I agree with you calling for caution.