I need to tell you about the clown.
Not because it’s a fun story — it isn’t. And not because it’s particularly dramatic — it’s the kind of thing that happens to kids all the time and usually means nothing. But in my case, this one experience created a filter through which I saw all of magic for the next twenty-five years. And that filter nearly kept me from ever picking up a deck of cards.
I was young. I don’t remember exactly how old — somewhere between six and eight, the age where everything adults do seems either magical or terrifying and you can’t always tell which is which. There was some kind of event. A party, a fair, a community gathering — the details are fuzzy the way childhood memories always are, half-remembered and filtered through decades of reinterpretation.
What I remember clearly is the performer.
He was a clown. Or a magician dressed as a clown. Or a children’s entertainer in a costume that was trying too hard to be both. Bright colors. Big voice. The kind of aggressive, in-your-face energy that some performers mistake for engagement.
He was loud. Not projected-voice-filling-a-room loud. Loud in the way that signals desperation — the volume cranked up because the material isn’t working, the energy forced because the connection isn’t there. Even as a kid, I could feel it. Something about this man was off. He wasn’t sharing something wonderful with us. He was performing at us.
There was a moment — and this is the one that stuck — where he called a child up to help with a trick. I don’t remember if it was me or another kid, but I remember the dynamic. The child was a prop. A punchline. The trick worked by making the child look foolish, and the adults laughed, and the performer fed on that laughter, and the child stood there in front of everyone not understanding why they were laughing but understanding, with the terrible clarity that children have, that the laughter was about them.
That was my introduction to magic.
A loud man in a ridiculous costume using children as props for adult amusement. Someone who had confused being the center of attention with being entertaining. Someone who had power over the room but used it to make himself feel big rather than to make his audience feel wonder.
I walked away from that experience with a conclusion that hardened into certainty over the years: magic is for kids. It’s silly. It’s embarrassing. It’s something that slightly desperate people do at children’s parties. It’s the guy with the top hat and the rabbit, the uncle who pulls a coin from behind your ear, the cheesy performer at the holiday resort who makes balloon animals between card tricks.
It was beneath me. That was the real message my childhood brain encoded. Not “magic is bad” but “magic is low-status.” It’s what unserious people do. It’s entertainment for people who don’t know any better.
I carried that prejudice for decades.
Through school, through university, through the early years of my consulting career. If someone mentioned magic, I’d mentally file them in a category. If a performer appeared at a corporate event, I’d politely watch for five minutes and then find the bar. I wasn’t hostile to magic. I was dismissive of it, which is worse. Hostility at least implies you think something is worth fighting against. Dismissiveness means you’ve decided it’s not worth your attention at all.
And here’s the thing about prejudice: it doesn’t just block bad experiences. It blocks good ones too.
During all those years of dismissal, I was walking past something extraordinary without knowing it. The world of magic — the real world, not the children’s party version — was right there. Performers like Michael Ammar, whose cups and balls routine is as technically demanding and artistically refined as any classical music performance I’ve ever seen. Thinkers like Darwin Ortiz, whose writing on presentation and audience psychology is as rigorous as any business strategy text. Artists like Derren Brown, who turned mentalism into a form of theater that challenges how audiences think about free will, choice, and perception.
All of it was there. And I was too busy being dismissive to notice.
When I finally did start with cards in that hotel room — the story I told in my first post — I didn’t think of it as “doing magic.” That framing would have triggered every alarm bell my childhood experience had installed. I thought of it as a manual dexterity challenge. A fidget with a learning curve. Something interesting for my hands to do while my brain cooled down from consulting work.
The reframing was essential. If someone had said to me, “Hey, you should try learning magic,” I would have said no. Instantly and firmly. The clown had made sure of that. But “learning card manipulation” or “practicing sleight of hand” — those phrases carried different associations. They sounded like skills, not silliness. They sounded like craftsmanship, not children’s entertainment.
I’m telling you this because I think a lot of adults — maybe you, if you’re reading this — carry similar filters. Not necessarily about magic, but about something. A creative pursuit you’ve written off because your only exposure to it was bad. A skill you’ve dismissed because the first person you saw doing it was doing it poorly. A whole domain of human experience that you’ve shut out because one negative data point got calcified into a permanent conclusion.
This is, by the way, a well-known cognitive bias. I’d later read about it in Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes’s work on the psychology of magic — our brains are wired to form strong impressions from single experiences, especially emotional ones, especially in childhood. One bad encounter with a performer doesn’t just make you cautious about that performer. It makes you cautious about the entire category. Your brain builds a wall and labels it “not for me” and you walk past it for the rest of your life without ever checking whether the label is still accurate.
The consultant in me eventually recognized this for what it was: a strategic blind spot. I’d spent my career helping companies identify their blind spots — the assumptions they’d never questioned, the markets they’d written off, the capabilities they’d dismissed because of a single bad experience years ago. And here I was, doing the exact same thing in my personal life.
It took about six months of hotel room practice before I could even say the word “magic” in relation to what I was doing without feeling a twinge of embarrassment. Six months. That’s how deep the clown’s damage went. I’d tell myself I was “practicing card skills” or “working on sleight of hand” or “doing a dexterity thing” — anything to avoid the word that would connect me to that childhood memory.
The shift happened gradually.
First, I started watching performance videos online. Not tutorials — performances. Complete routines by people who were clearly operating at a level so far beyond the birthday party clown that they might as well have been doing a different art form. I watched Michael Ammar’s cups and balls and felt the same kind of awe I felt listening to a great jazz drummer. I watched Bob Hayden’s shell game and couldn’t believe the precision, the timing, the way his hands moved with the fluidity of a concert pianist.
These people weren’t clowns. They weren’t silly. They weren’t embarrassing. They were artists. They had dedicated thousands of hours to mastering a craft that demanded physical precision, psychological understanding, theatrical skill, and creative thinking. They were, in every meaningful sense, the equal of any performing artist in any other discipline.
And I started to get angry.
Not at the clown — he was probably just a guy doing his best with limited skills and a tough audience. I got angry at myself. At the decades I’d wasted dismissing something extraordinary because of a single data point from childhood. At all the joy and fascination and creative growth I’d missed because I’d been too proud, too “sophisticated,” too identified with my consultant persona to look past my own prejudice.
Ken Weber — whose book “Maximum Entertainment” would later become one of my most dog-eared references — writes about something he calls the Hierarchy of Mystery Entertainment. At the bottom is the puzzle: a trick that makes people think “I could do that if I knew the secret.” In the middle is the trick: something that earns respect for perceived skill. At the top is the extraordinary moment: something that leaves no room for explanation, that produces not curiosity about method but genuine wonder.
The clown had given me a puzzle. A bad one. And I’d judged the entire art form based on the bottom rung of its hierarchy.
That would be like hearing a child bang on a piano and concluding that music is noise. Like reading a bad novel and concluding that literature is a waste of time. Like eating at a terrible restaurant and concluding that food is just fuel.
The top of the hierarchy — the extraordinary moment — was out there the whole time. I just couldn’t see it because a loud man in a bright costume had gotten to me first.
I write about this now because I think it matters for anyone starting something new. Your starting point shapes everything. The first exposure you have to a discipline creates a frame that’s incredibly hard to break. And if that first exposure is negative, it can lock you out of something life-changing.
But frames can be broken. Assumptions can be updated. The consulting brain that helped me build business strategies also, eventually, helped me recognize my own strategic error. The same analytical toolkit I used to assess companies could be turned inward, on my own biases, my own blind spots, my own un-examined conclusions.
Magic isn’t what the clown showed me. Magic is what I discovered in spite of the clown. And the gap between those two things — between the worst version of an art form and the best version — is so vast that they barely belong in the same category.
I’m glad I found my way past the filter. I almost didn’t. Twenty-five years of dismissal is a long time, and there’s a version of my life where I never bought that deck of cards, never started practicing in hotel rooms, never fell down the rabbit hole, never met Adam, never built Vulpine Creations.
In that version, I’m still sitting in hotel rooms scrolling my phone. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a clown is still making a kid feel small, and I’m still drawing the wrong conclusion from it.