She’s covered in sweat,
Exhausted from playing.
Her hands glide over the keys,
Playing a melody as she goes along,
Imperfectly stringing the notes together.

She slips up, makes a mistake.
Her hands tremble at the flat note
Escaping from her instrument.
She stops playing.

Her fingertips feel as if they might bleed.
Her lungs are running out of air.
The piece she must perform is still far from perfect,
Far from where she wants it to be.

It’s been two hours since her last break.
Rehearsal would start in three hours.
She had three hours to perfect the piece.
She knew it was impossible.

Practice doesn’t make perfect,
Practice makes improvement.
People live their whole lives striving for perfection,
An unattainable goal,
And never back down no matter what.

That’s what she was doing.
Rehearsal was two hours and twenty minutes away.
Rehearsal had to be amazing,
Like she was performing at the very concert she was rehearsing for.

Practice makes improvement,
And to her, the music she was playing sounded like s***.
To an untrained ear, it sounded magnificent.
That’s the real difference of it all.

No matter how hard you practice,
Someone’s going to be better than you.
No matter how much you try to be the best,
It’s impossible.

Even if you put in multiple hours a day,
Someone’s going to tell you that your skills are too underdeveloped.
What makes the difference in skill is not your level of talent,
But the amount of work you put into developing that talent.
The girl gets back to work on the piece,
this time, correcting her mistake,
Making it one step closer to perfect.