Anglers!

Anglers! Look at your guides on their days off, unguidedly catching fish after fish! Look at your legs, your arms, your rod! Feel the heft and synaptic whir of your big cerebrum! You've got everything they've got! What the hell have you been thinking? GO FISHING YOURSELF! We are a nation plagued with self-annointed experts, pundits, middle-persons. Away with them! Dare to be the bumbling hero of your very own fish story! Chop your psyche in half, make a guru/disciple relationship out of it, seat your humble self at the feet of your sagacious self. Read like a fiend; practice like a fool; find the best possible river on the best possible map; read about it; explore it; stick your body in it; cast into it. If you fall in, get out. If you hook yourself, unhook yourself. Make mistakes! It doesn't matter! Make a half-drowned, half-thrashed rat of yourself. Forgive yourself. Regroup. Do it all over again. And at the end of your day, pay yourself. Charge an arm and a leg. Leave yourself huge tips. Remarkably painless, isn't it?

-From David James Duncan's In Praise of No Guide.