Richard M. Riss

• Set yourself up to have a good, productive efficient time of practice; do not be in a rush.
• Practice efficiently.  Set time limits.  Do not practice more than four to five hours a day.
• Know exactly what you want to accomplish.  Plan everything to the smallest possible detail, then practice putting it all together.  
• Practice extremely slowly, and for difficult passages, do this seven or eight times.  Practice in small sections.
• Practice with your head, and not mindlessly.  Do not play anything without listening carefully with a discerning ear.
• After completing a number of months of extremely slow muscle-memory practice, do trial runs in front of an audience, such as a retirement community.  If possible, do this thirty or forty times before an important concert.  Be familiar with what happens to you when you get nervous playing in public, so that you can compensate.
• Do not imitate others.  Be yourself.  What suits others may not really fit you.
• Talent is just a mood. Expect yourself to succeed.  Have patience; don’t give up.  If you think you can eventually play a particular work or passage the way that you would like to play it, then you will; if you think that you would never be able to play it the way you would like to play it, then you never will.