“It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice.
Here are several poor ways of practice that you should understand. Usually when you practice music, you become very idealistic, and you set up an ideal or goal which you strive to attain and fulfill. This is absurd.
When you are idealistic, you have some gaining idea within yourself; by the time you attain your ideal or goal, your gaining idea will create another ideal. So as long as your practice is based on a gaining idea, and you practice music in an idealistic way, you will have no time actually to attain your ideal. Moreover, you will be sacrificing the meat of your practice. Because your attainment is always ahead, you will always be sacrificing yourself now for some ideal in the future. You end up with nothing. This is absurd; it is not adequate practice at all. But even worse than this idealistic attitude is to practice music in competition with someone else. This is a poor, shabby kind of practice.” – Shunryu Suzuki