"Open Mindedness" is sometimes a dubious value. As a musician, I find the creative process really favors closed mindeness--which is to say, finding useful devices like Travis-picking, for instance and eliminating all the extraneous possibilities--Bill's kind of "open mindedness" would be counterproductive, because it would require me to return to a neutral position and consider a lot of things that aren't very useful--

And, I bring up Travis-picking here because its definition and validity are as hotly contested at Mudcat as the idea of God--