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A lesson from my oboe lessons

When I was at band two nights ago, one of the flute players was lamenting that she'd be way better if she'd just take her flute out and practice it for an hour every day. Except that's totally unrealistic. Nobody who is a normal adult and has normal adult responsibilities (I believe this woman has a business contracting to sew home decor items, which she sometimes does until 2am, and has a child, etc.) has time to practice for an hour per day. I don't manage to practice for an hour per week (though that may be partly because I don't want to wear out my reeds).

So I mentioned that back when I took oboe lessons, my teacher told me to practice for 15 minutes a day. And that was good, because it got me to take the instrument out and put it together every day, with a minimal time commitment. Who doesn't have 15 minutes? And in fact, once the instrument was out, I used to often practice far more than 15 minutes some days. And then I said "In fact, this is something I should apply this to other areas of my life."

And last night, I opened "Toothbrushing Club" for about 20 minutes. I removed a superfluous and hard-to-explain character and tried to work on clarifying the location a bit more.

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