Practicing the hard part slowly feels like wasted time. It’s usually the fastest way through.

Working through something slowly feels like wasted effort because it produces no performance and no visible progress. What it produces is accuracy, and speed built on accuracy arrives much faster than speed built on an error you have rehearsed two hundred times. Full-tempo repetition mostly teaches you to make the same mistake more fluently.

Take the four hardest bars, the one move, the one serve, and do it at half pace until it is boring and correct. Add speed only once it stops going wrong. Fifteen slow minutes beats an hour of hoping.