How to Improve Your Glassblowing

I'm contacted a few times a year by students of glass about all sorts of stuff--mostly requesting visits, internships and advice on how to best learn glassblowing.  I've answered enough of the education questions that I thought I would post them here so I can direct future inquires to this post.  Here's a quick braindump:

1. Get both of Ed Schimd's books and read them over and over until they fall apart. You'll learn a ton and as you gain skills in the shop, things in the book will make more sense so re-reading really helps.
2. Don't think about making glass as a process to memorize and repeat unless you're focused exclusively on production work.   You'll learn more by understanding the reason *why* each move is important and what it does to the glass.
3. Everything in glass comes back to heat.  What's hot, how hot, hot in the core vs. surface, etc.  The more you're able to identify and understand the heat in the glass (by color, movement, how something inflates, and how recently everything was moving) the quicker you'll become skilled.  Many of the indicators are subtle--you've got to pay close attention.
4. All the motions you do in the shop are odd and/or awkward so if the only time you get in/out of the bench, turn a pipe, gather, marver, use hand tools, etc. is when you're in the hot shop, you'll take a long time to get used to these motions.  If you practice turning at home with a dowel, marver on your coffee table, etc. when you get into the shop these motions will feel familiar.  And if you can't turn and marver evenly and fluidly (like a machine!), you will throw off the even-ness of the heat in your work.  And it's all about heat.
5. Always challenge yourself by working the glass hot.  Once the glass has stopped moving you're doing coldworking in the hotshop.  Bad.  Work hot and learn how maintaining a core heat is critical, how it makes your life easier, your glass more evenly blown and everything just work better.  Just about everything you'll do in glassblowing works better when you're working hot.
6. In the first year if you're not failing occasionally you're not challenging yourself enough.  
7. You can play around with cane and murrine, but it will be really frustrating until you've got a solid foundation in glassblowing, understand how heat works and have good hand skills.  By the time you're picking up murrine off a plate you've got a ton of time into the piece and if you crash and burn it's even more frustrating and expensive, so it's best to get your basics rock solid before you venture into the world of constructed bubbles.  That said, give it a try if you want; just know it makes a tricky thing trickier.  It will be easier when you're bettter.
8. Be persistent and always analyze why something went well or failed.  If you don't learn from every piece you won't get better very quickly.
9. Watch, watch, watch everyone you can and try to understand why they do what they do in the shop.  There's no one right way to blow glass but there are efficient ways skilled people work and you can learn a ton from watching and studying them.  You can also learn from other people's screw ups, and maybe avoid some problems yourself.  So watch anyone blowing glass.  Ask questions politely and listen when people answer!
10. Calm down!  Glass is exciting and most people have their adrenaline flowing in the hot shop, but you'll be a better glassblower if you slow down, calm down and pay close attention to what you're doing.
11. Take classes in marketing and business at school since understanding about how to sell your work is critical and something that will benefit you throughout your career no matter what you do. While you can easily learn glassblowing outside of school, good general business education isn't taught at your local hotshop.  It's much more important to having a sucessful arts career than how good you are at reticello.