Man, I failed miserably at becoming a successful musician, but playing the piano from a young age thankfully taught me how to assimilate negative feedback.

Every time I started a new piece, the only indisputable fact was that I was leaping into a technical fiasco. My fingers were never prepared for what was coming. Every passage was, in its own way, completely alien.

And this is something no teacher tells you, but that most musicians internalize naturally: every time you play it wrong, you're learning a little bit about how to do it right.

With every error, you play a little less wrong. So the virtuoso is not the one that avoided the largest amount of mistakes during the piece, but the one that spent the most amount of time carefully carving them out of it.