Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Zen advice

My brother Sean, a professional musician, offers the following advice to his older sibling (pardon the cutesy lack of capitalization, most punctuation, and paragraph breaks!):

congrats for making it through it. ive certainly been in situations that are very strange like that before [i.e., 3:1 tutoring, with students all doing different things]. i find that the best way to deal with it is to empty your mind of preconceptions over how things should be run. a lot of people (myself included) get locked into a certain way of thinking that only this way or that way is the best way to teach or run rehearsal etc. but usually what happens is that so much energy is spent thinking about how the system is wrong that precious time and energy is wasted that couldve been used figuring out how to make the absolute best of the system.

[...]

anyway good luck!


Undeniably good advice. I promised Sean that I'd try to implement it. As I told him in my reply, the thought sustaining me right now is that I'm giving back to my brothers after all the help they've given me.


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