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She can also stretch to 11ths. This is all that works for her and some of her ideas such as relaxation, stretching are worth considering bearing in mind that most won't be able to do such fast trills and scales like her during the warmup. But scales and arpeggios yes - very much the basics needed for classical music.

I appreciate the sentiment with regard to such an abstract quote as the Fleischer one, but just a suggestion to stay with it a bit longer.

When you say you can't play an even scale beacause the second finger is coming down to early, you are simply aiming to high.

Play it slower, play only two consecutive notes,slowly, stopping on the second finger, relaxed, with some sense of balance, awareness and so on. Listen to those two notes and adjust.

Not trying to be obnoxious, but one thing that made me improve was realizing the perfectionism it really takes to get beyond amateurish level. It is also rewarding in a different way when you start to be able to play at least very simple things Really Well - it gets kind of addictive and you want to break things down ever more and slow down. For me the hurdle was getting into that super basic attentive mind set in the first place

I couldn't agree more. Every word you've written here accords exactly with my own ongoing learning-experience over my 50 year-long, deepening-by-the-day love affair with the piano and addiction to discovering the infinite diversity of sounds that composers have conceived for it.

Listen to those two notes and adjust. - that is Fleisher's point in a nutshell, and the key to accessing the super-attentive mindset you're referring to. The mindset revolves around acquainting yourself with the distinctive acoustical quality and character of a sound you wish to experience, aiming when you make the action to exactly imitate and reproduce that experience, listening to the sound that results, and on each re-attempt allowing the qualities of your actions to be naturally guided entirely on the basis of how well the sound they produce matches the one you experienced on your previous attempt. It's all matter of letting your ear take control over your actions, instead of the opposite. That, after all, is the basic function of our senses and of conscious experiencing - to inform our actions and enable us to adjust them in accord with whatever it is we're experiencing.