Alvarez had a different response when she heard. “Rich toothbrush is efficient imagery,” she said. “Still don’t say it.” Daniel Cho used the incident to teach something broader.
“Every serious musician eventually meets somebody with more money, better equipment, earlier training, faster fingers, stronger technique, or more confidence,” he told Eli. “If your reason for playing depends on defeating those people, you will be miserable even when you win.” Eli looked skeptical. “So I’m not supposed to care if somebody’s better?”
“You should care enough to learn. Not enough to disappear.” That distinction took months to understand. At first Eli still practiced as if every mistake were evidence that Grant had been right.
He attacked technical exercises too hard, repeated difficult measures after fatigue had made repetition useless, and once came to a lesson with his right wrist sore because he had spent ninety minutes on octaves Daniel had not even assigned. Daniel stopped the lesson immediately and made him ice the wrist. “You are trying to accelerate through anxiety,” he said. Eli hated how accurate that sounded.
“Can I still practice left hand?” “No.” “Scales?” “No.”
“Listen to recordings?” “That is not practice.” “It kind of is.” Daniel smiled.
“Fine. Go listen.” Being forced not to play for four days taught Eli more about himself than another four days of scales might have. He realized how quickly music had become tangled with proof.
The station adults had mocked him, and even after their comments stopped mattering socially, he had kept them alive internally as an audience he needed to defeat. Grant’s backpack joke simply replaced them. Every difficult measure became a courtroom. Mrs.