A wise lesson once given to me by a person I can&#x27;t recall:<p><i>If you&#x27;re going to &quot;practice&quot; guitar, then actually concentrate on what you&#x27;re doing - don&#x27;t just have one in your hands and fumble around with it while you&#x27;re watching TV - focus and you will improve.</i><p>...which blends with another maxim I picked up:<p><i>There are some guitarists who can truthfully say they&#x27;ve played for 40 years - and it sounds impressive until you find out they&#x27;ve only played the same 9 chords the entire time.</i><p>So I can appreciate what the article is kind of pointing out in a lot of words - &quot;Practice makes better&quot; - it&#x27;s a perfectly reasonable message to put forward. The examples are okay overall. There&#x27;s a lesson in there about the ceramics class, but it seems like a setup from the beginning - a lot of varibles in the outcome depending on the professor, right? I mean, just letting the non-quantity group sit there and drool or goof off isn&#x27;t maximizing the actual concept of reaching for perfection.<p>Oh, and I listened to a 60 minute long tape of Kanye from that prolific period. The end results are really cookie-cutter. He basically found a sample of music that somebody else wrote &amp; recorded, stretched&#x2F;looped it, added a hip-hop sounding MPC kit line under it, and called it done. It&#x27;s a strong example of mechanical repetition to hone the tools of a trade (production&#x2F;sound engineering). Personally I view it as the antithesis of writing original material, but like I said, personal opinion.