The great violinist Jascha Heifetz once remarked that we should always be happy when performing. After all, if things are going well, we should be happy that we’re having a good day. And if things are going badly, each note we play gets us closer to the end, so we should be happy about that too.

That said, it’s still no fun to be stuck on stage, feeling like we're laying an egg. Cringing at each botched shift, garbled run, and cracked note. Which of course just leads to a downward spiral of negativity and increasingly uninspired playing, as a tiny part of us curls up into a ball and dies on the inside, wondering why we even bother to try.

Of course, a week or month (or decade) later, we screw up the courage to listen to a recording of the performance, and are pleasantly surprised by how decent we sound. How the horrible things we were initially mortified by, are barely noticeable, and how many nice moments there are that we didn’t even remember.

So what's the deal? Do we sound better in the moment than we think? Or are our recording devices just not sensitive enough to pick up the things we hear?