A Quote by Yo-Yo Ma

Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes.
I know that I won't succeed at everything, every day. Some days have to be solely about my daughter. Some days I really try to be a good wife. Other days, I can take a few hours for myself and just do nothing but really focus on work.
Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.
I always try and get one 'good run' in, which for me is about 5 miles without stopping. On most other days, I run so I can get out of the house and catch some fresh air or listen to some music or just escape the world for 45 minutes or so, and on those days, I'll still walk/run.
Moments into minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into days. Days into years. Years into possibility. This will linger.
I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.
Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?
I trained for less than three-quarters of an hour, maybe five days a week - I didn't have time to do more. But it was all about quality, not quantity - so I didn't waste time jogging, ever.
I always think family get-togethers when everybody just sort of crashes out are pretty much the best. If it's more than a few days it gets hard, but for just a few days, it's the most amazing thing ever.
At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.
If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.
I go to my studio every day. Some days work comes easily. Other days nothing happens. Yet on the good days the inspiration is only an accumulation of all the other days, the nonproductive ones.
When you learn an instrument, it takes an awful lot of time to just learn the scales, and then eventually when you have completely mastered the instrument, the music plays for you. But you still have to keep practicing. And it takes an awful lot of practice. Nonetheless, if you diligently practice, hours and hours and hours and hours, you probably won't get it. You'll probably just end up hurting your fingers.
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.
Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days.
It's difficult to say there's something I dislike the most about Hillary Clinton. Frankly, in a weird way, she's had to eat a whole lot of excrement sandwiches in her life, and some days she's had mustard to put on them and some days not. Some days mayonnaise and some days just plain.
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