I didn't make any mistakes!

Well, that's not entirely true...

I made plenty of mistakes, probably far more than you guys do now. But the thing was, I was learning to LD almost 40 years ago, before even the term "lucid dreaming" had entered the popular culture (I sure never heard it, and LaBerge was still a student at the time, with EWOLD -- and all those terms, like WILD, DILD, MILD, etc., still far in his future). Also, my dream work began decades before the internet existed, in a world where I was surrounded by people who cared nothing about dreaming, and where resources into dreaming, much less LD'ing, were rare to nonexistent, and what I could find was usually unhelpful.

In other words I was on my own. But that had a major advantage: I never did anything wrong, because I had no idea that there were things to do wrong. Everything that happened, whether it was, in retrospect, a mistake or a real step forward, was for me something new, and always a positive experience. I never had my confidence shaken because I wasn't meeting goals set by others, or wasn't succeeding with RC's, or wasn't doing a technique correctly. I just lived and learned, and eventually began LD'ing successfully (mostly through what would eventually be called WILD's) -- all without ever knowing I was making a mistake. It took a bit longer than people take now, but my path to consistent LD'ing was filled more with discovery than disappointment or anxiety about "not doing it right."

I wonder if there's a lesson in there somewhere?