The rehearsal nobody applauds makes the performance worth listening to.

What an audience hears is the visible tip of a great deal of unwitnessed repetition. The hours in a cold room, the same eight bars again, the corrections nobody will ever know were needed: none of that gets applause, and all of it is why the applause happens. Admiring only the finished thing quietly misunderstands where the work lives.

Give your own unwatched hours the respect they earn rather than treating them as what happens before the real thing. And when you admire someone’s performance, let your mind go back to the practice behind it. It usually changes what you think you are seeing.