There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with hotel rooms.
Not the dramatic kind. Not the kind that makes for good stories at dinner parties. It’s the quiet, beige-walled, minibar-humming kind. The kind where you’ve eaten room service for the fourth night in a row and the remote control has become your closest companion. The kind where the view from the fourteenth floor could be Stuttgart or Stockholm or São Paulo and it wouldn’t matter because the room looks exactly the same.
I was a strategy and innovation consultant. That sounds impressive until you realize what it actually means on a Tuesday night in November. It means you flew in that morning, spent ten hours in a conference room with whiteboards and PowerPoint decks, ate something forgettable with colleagues you’ll forget, and now you’re sitting on a bed that isn’t yours, in a city that doesn’t care you exist, wondering what to do with the three hours between now and sleep.
Two hundred nights a year. That was my life.
I’m not complaining. The work was good. The money was good. The intellectual challenge of walking into a company, diagnosing their strategic problems, and designing a path forward — that lit me up. I’m Austrian, and there’s something deeply satisfying about bringing structure to chaos, about turning a messy situation into a clean framework with clear next steps. That part, I loved.
But the evenings. The evenings were a void.
I’m a musician. That’s the other part of me that most people in the business world never saw. Music has always been my thing — the creative outlet, the thing that made me feel alive outside of spreadsheets and stakeholder maps. But you can’t bring a piano on the road. You can’t set up a drum kit in a Marriott. I tried bringing a guitar once, but between the carry-on luggage restrictions and the looks from fellow business travelers in the lounge, it didn’t last.
So there I was. Two hundred nights a year with nothing to do with my hands.
I don’t remember the exact night. I wish I could tell you it was dramatic — a lightning bolt, a sign from the universe, a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger in the hotel bar. But it wasn’t. It was just another evening of scrolling my phone, clicking through random websites, burning time until my eyes got heavy enough to sleep.
I ended up on ellusionist.com.
I don’t even know how I got there. Maybe an ad. Maybe a recommendation algorithm that noticed I’d been watching variety show clips. But there it was — a website selling card tricks. Video tutorials. Beginner stuff. And a deck of cards for sale.
I bought the deck. I bought a tutorial. I think the total was less than thirty euros.
When the package arrived at my next hotel — I’d had it shipped to the front desk, which must have confused the concierge — I sat on the bed, opened the cellophane on a fresh Bicycle deck, and started trying to do a basic card fan.
It was terrible.
My fingers didn’t cooperate. The cards sprayed across the duvet like startled birds. I couldn’t get them to spread evenly. I couldn’t get the pressure right. I watched the tutorial again. Tried again. Slightly less terrible. Tried again. Still bad, but now bad in a different way. The cards were at least staying in my hands.
And something happened that I wasn’t expecting.
I forgot about the hotel room.
For the first time in years of business travel, I wasn’t counting the hours until sleep. I wasn’t channel-surfing past German game shows and CNN International. I wasn’t staring at the ceiling thinking about tomorrow’s workshop. I was completely absorbed in trying to make fifty-two pieces of laminated cardboard do something they didn’t want to do.
It was the most engaged I’d felt outside of work in months.
Now, I need to be honest about something. I didn’t have a good relationship with magic. Not at all. I had a very specific, very negative memory from childhood — a clown performer at some event in Austria who was loud and obnoxious and made kids feel small. I’ll get into that story properly in a later post, but the short version is: magic, to me, was a children’s thing. It was birthday parties and top hats and “pick a card, any card” followed by a punchline that was never funny.
I was a grown man. A consultant. I dealt in strategy frameworks and competitive analysis. The idea that I’d be sitting in a hotel room trying to do card tricks would have made my colleagues laugh. It would have made me laugh, a week earlier.
But here’s what I was discovering, even in those first clumsy attempts: there was a craft here. Not the cheesy stuff I remembered from childhood. There was actual technique. There was a specific way to hold the deck. A specific pressure to apply with each finger. A geometry to the fan that, when I got it even slightly right, produced something genuinely beautiful.
And the video tutorials I was watching — they weren’t taught by clowns. They were taught by people who moved with a precision and confidence that reminded me of the best musicians I’d played with. There was an artistry to it that I had never, in my entire life, associated with magic.
That first night, I practiced for about two hours. I couldn’t do a single thing properly. But I could feel something shifting in my brain — the same feeling I got when I first sat behind a drum kit, or the first time a strategic framework clicked into place and I could see the whole competitive landscape laid out in front of me. It was the feeling of encountering a new system, a new domain, a new set of rules to learn and eventually master.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was standing at the edge of a rabbit hole that would consume the next several years of my life, introduce me to my future business partner, and completely reshape how I think about performance, psychology, and what it means to be good at something.
All I knew that night was that my hands finally had something to do.
Over the next few weeks, I developed a routine. Fly in. Workshop. Dinner. Hotel room. Cards. I started ordering more tutorials. Then books. Then I discovered that there was an entire world of card magic that I had no idea existed — techniques developed over centuries, refined by generations of performers, documented in texts that some practitioners treated with the reverence of sacred manuscripts.
The more I dug, the more I realized how wrong my assumptions had been. This wasn’t kids’ stuff. This was a discipline as deep and demanding as any musical instrument, any martial art, any performing art I’d ever encountered. People dedicated their lives to this. There was theory. There was history going back to the 1500s. There were debates about method and presentation that echoed the debates I knew from the business world about strategy versus execution.
I was hooked. Completely, irrevocably hooked.
And I was terrible. Let me be clear about that. I was a forty-something consultant who had never performed anything in his life — at least not on a stage. I had no background in performance. No theater training. No dance classes. Nothing. I was starting from absolute zero, in a field where most of the people I was watching on YouTube had been practicing since they were twelve.
But I had one thing going for me that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: I knew how to learn. Not because I’m some kind of genius, but because consulting had trained me to walk into completely unfamiliar domains — healthcare systems, automotive supply chains, banking regulations — and get up to speed fast. I knew how to find the right sources. I knew how to build mental models. I knew how to identify the twenty percent of knowledge that gives you eighty percent of the results.
What I didn’t know — what it would take me years to discover — is that learning a physical skill is fundamentally different from learning an intellectual domain. And that almost everything I instinctively did when I sat down to practice was wrong.
But that’s a story for later posts. A story about a practice methodology that would eventually transform not just my card skills but my entire understanding of how people get good at things.
For now, all you need to know is this: it started with a deck of cards, a hotel room, and a consultant who was looking for something to do with his hands.
If you’d told me that night where it would lead — to meeting Adam Wilber, to founding Vulpine Creations, to standing on a stage performing for hundreds of people, to writing this blog — I would have laughed at you. I would have said you were doing a very good magic trick yourself, because there was no way any of that was possible.
But it was. And it started right here. On a hotel bed. With fifty-two cards and absolutely no idea what I was doing.
If you’re reading this and you’re at the beginning of something — magic, music, writing, anything — and you feel ridiculous because you’re starting late, because everyone else seems further ahead, because you have no background and no credentials and no reason to believe you’ll ever be any good…
I was you. Exactly you. And I’m writing this from the other side of a journey I never expected to take.
Stick around. I’ll tell you everything I learned along the way.