The homeowner who showed me my own pruning mistake with one branch
Last month in Dayton, I was doing a routine oak trim and this older guy comes out holding a single cut branch from his backyard tree. He said, "you cut this one last spring and it's already splitting at the union." I walked over with him and sure enough, the cut was too flush against the trunk, exactly the kind of thing I'd been criticizing on other people's work for years. He didn't get mad, just asked why I did it that way. I honestly had no good answer, I was rushing to fit in one more job that day. It took a stranger pointing at one limb to make me slow down and recheck my own cuts on every tree since then. Has anyone else caught themselves making the same mistake they call out in others, and how did you fix the habit?