The object kept from a first attempt can remind skill to remain patient with beginners.

Skill has a habit of forgetting its own beginnings. Once something is easy, years of being clumsy at it compress into a sentence, and impatience with beginners follows almost automatically. A crooked first pot, an early drawing, a piece of work you would now redo: keeping one holds on to the evidence that fluency was built rather than issued. The object argues with your memory, which is what makes it useful.

Find something you made when you were bad at it and put it where you will see it. Before you next teach or correct someone, look at it. Then say the thing you needed to hear at that stage.