I was doing my usual thing where I was whining about collectors not throwing enough and not touching material like horizontal in some form or another, when a user here brought up a great point. He said:
And I thought “awesome response”, and I totally see where he’s coming from. But, my experience is slightly different. I say, he’s totally right if you’re talking about top competitors. No one wins worlds while holding down a professional 9-5 (to my knowledge).
BUT, my counter example to your point is myself. I’m a pre-med student, a let me tell you man, it’s rough. Last semester I was up at 6:30 doing calculus every morning, and I usually put in over well 8 hours of work, not counting class time. When you’re taking strenuous math, biology, and chemistry classes simultaneously, school rapidly turns into a full time commitment.
But I still made time to practice the violin for 90-120 minutes, and yo-yo for half an hour, every day. (And I usually got 8 hours of sleep too 
). For me, the key is consistency. Half an hour EVERY day, will lead to results. This is more than enough time to learn horizontal too. But you gotta do it consistently. And you’ve got to be motivated to improve. By that I mean actually PRACTICE. Break down what you’re having trouble with. Work on what you consistently fail at. Isolate one move and do it repeatedly. Few tricks are out of reach when exposed to this treatment.
Sound like turning yo-yo into boring work? Wondering why you would ever do that instead of just doing Kwijibo on your titanium yo-yo, and not having to practice? Do you say you have no interest in improving your skill, when you can just buy another yo-yo?
My response is: do me favor. Up your skill. Learn those hard tricks.
And then, when you’re yoyoing to music and you realize you can do any one of 6 great looking combos when your favorite part comes on,
When you get another $200 yo-yo, and you realize you can actually USE it, and REALLY appreciate it, by putting it through its paces, and by being able to tell how it actually plays, instead of just “appreciating the craftsmanship”,
When you look back at videos from yourself a year ago, and you can’t believe it’s even the same person yoyoing because you’ve improved yourself so much with you own two hands,
Tell me then it was all boring work. Tell me it wasn’t worth it.
I will post a video down below of some the tricks I made in the last year. Granted, some of them were made during summer vacation, which full time employees don’t really get, but most of them weren’t. Some of my very best tricks have been made at 9:15 PM right before I got into bed after a crazy day of solid studying.
During the hardest schooling semester of my life to date, I managed to pick up a sponsorship with Sengoku as well. You can do really cool stuff on less practice than you might think.
Anyway, here’s that video, and sorry if I got too preachy :
(Just reading this back, I apologize if it comes off as overly aggressive or critical. But if you couldn’t tell, this is something I’m very passionate about. 
)
