There is a moment that every adult beginner knows.
You’ve been practicing something for a few weeks. You’re getting better. You can feel it — the cards are behaving a little more, your fingers are finding their positions a little faster, the movements that felt completely alien at first are starting to settle into something that almost resembles competence. You’re proud of yourself, in a quiet way. You’re making progress.
And then you go on YouTube.
And within thirty seconds, you see a sixteen-year-old kid executing a move so smooth, so fast, so impossibly fluid that it looks like the cards are alive in his hands. A move you’ve been struggling with for two weeks. A move that makes your best attempt look like a toddler trying to tie shoelaces with oven mitts.
The pride evaporates. The progress you felt? Gone. Your brain does what brains do — it draws a comparison, measures the gap, and delivers its verdict: You’re terrible. You will always be terrible. That kid started when he was eight and you’re starting at forty-something. You will never, ever be able to do what he’s doing.
Welcome to the internet era of learning anything.
I went through this cycle dozens of times in my first few months with cards. I’d practice in the hotel room, feel good about a new technique I was developing, then make the mistake of going online and watching someone who had been doing it since childhood perform the same technique at a level so far beyond mine that the comparison felt absurd.
It’s not just that they were better. Of course they were better — they’d been practicing for years. The problem was the compression. On YouTube, you only see the finished product. You see the result of ten thousand hours distilled into a three-minute video. You don’t see the years of dropped cards, the frustration, the plateaus, the moments when they wanted to quit. You see perfection, presented as though it’s normal, as though it’s the baseline, as though anything less is failure.
And your brain, helpful as always, interprets that as the standard you should be meeting.
I had a particular crisis about three months in. I’d been working on a specific technique — I won’t name it because the specifics don’t matter and because this blog follows a strict rule about not exposing methods. But it was a fundamental card sleight, one that every serious card worker needs to be able to do. The kind of move that separates people who fidget with cards from people who actually do card magic.
I’d been practicing it every evening for about two weeks. Getting better slowly. Some nights I could feel it working. Other nights my fingers forgot everything they’d learned and I was back to square one. The inconsistency was maddening but, looking back, completely normal.
Then I found a compilation video. Twenty different cardists performing this same technique. One after another. Filmed from close up, in slow motion, from multiple angles. Every single one of them executed it perfectly. Some of them added flourishes on top of it that I couldn’t even comprehend.
I put the cards down. I closed the laptop. I stared at the ceiling of a hotel room in — I think it was Frankfurt — and seriously considered whether I should just stop.
Not because I’d lost interest. The fascination was still there. But because the gap between where I was and where these people were seemed not just large but fundamentally unbridgeable. They weren’t just ahead of me on the same road. They seemed to be on a different road entirely, one that I couldn’t access because I’d started too late, because my fingers weren’t wired the right way, because I didn’t have the years of muscle memory they’d accumulated since childhood.
I was experiencing something that, I’d later learn, has a name: the comparison trap.
It’s something I eventually read about in the practice methodology books that would transform how I approached learning. The comparison trap isn’t just an emotional response — it’s a cognitive distortion. Your brain takes incomplete information (a three-minute highlight reel), draws a false comparison (their best moment versus your current average), and generates a conclusion (you can’t do this) that feels objective but is actually absurd.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know in that Frankfurt hotel room:
Every single one of those people on YouTube had a period where they were exactly as bad as I was. Every one of them dropped the deck. Every one of them had nights where the technique fell apart. Every one of them went through a phase where the move was inconsistent, where it worked sometimes and failed other times, where they felt like they were making no progress at all.
The difference is that nobody filmed those phases. Nobody uploaded “Watch me fail at this basic technique for two straight minutes.” The internet selects for finished products. It’s a showroom of results with the process removed.
And the process is where all the learning happens.
I decided to keep going. Not because I had some great insight that night — I didn’t. I kept going because the alternative was going back to scrolling my phone in hotel rooms, and I’d already had enough of that life. The cards, even when they frustrated me, were still more engaging than the void they’d replaced.
But I did make a decision that turned out to be one of the most important of my entire journey: I stopped watching performance videos.
Cold turkey. For about two months, I didn’t watch a single YouTube magician. I didn’t look at any compilation videos. I didn’t browse Instagram accounts of card handlers. I focused entirely on my own practice, my own progress, my own incremental improvements. I measured myself against yesterday-me, not against the internet.
And something remarkable happened.
Without the constant comparison, I could actually feel my progress again. Without the highlight reels, my own improvement — slow, messy, inconsistent as it was — became visible to me. I started noticing things: oh, I can do this fan without looking now. Oh, that cut is actually smooth tonight. Oh, my hands aren’t cramping anymore during that particular move.
These were tiny victories. But they were mine. And without the crushing weight of comparison, they were enough to keep me going.
Later, when I started reading more seriously about practice methodology, I encountered a concept that put all of this into a framework. The books I was studying distinguished between two types of motivation: gain motivation (driven by the desire to improve, to progress, to reach new levels) and fear motivation (driven by the desire to not lose what you have, to not fall behind, to not be exposed as inadequate).
YouTube had been activating my fear motivation. Every video of a better performer triggered the same response: I’m falling behind. I’m inadequate. I need to catch up or give up. That fear response doesn’t help you practice — it makes you anxious, conservative, and focused on the gap rather than the path.
When I cut off the comparison source, gain motivation took over. I practiced because I wanted to get better, not because I was afraid of being bad. I experimented because I was curious, not because I was trying to match an impossible standard. I enjoyed the process because the process was all there was — no external benchmark to fail against.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying you should never watch other performers. I’ve learned enormous amounts from studying the best in the field, and there’s a right time and a right way to do it. But there’s a difference between studying a performer with specific learning objectives (what is their timing like? how do they use eye contact? what’s their pacing?) and passively consuming performance videos as a benchmark for your own adequacy.
The first is education. The second is self-destruction.
If you’re starting something as an adult — magic or anything else — the internet is both your greatest resource and your most dangerous enemy. It gives you access to more learning material than any previous generation could have dreamed of. And it simultaneously gives you access to more comparison material than any human psyche was designed to handle.
The performers I was watching on YouTube didn’t start as the polished, effortless artists I saw on screen. They started exactly where I started: with a deck of cards and no idea what they were doing. The difference between us wasn’t talent or potential or some mystical hand-eye coordination gene. The difference was time. They’d put in years that I hadn’t put in yet.
And the only way to close that gap was to keep practicing. Not to close the gap with them — that was never the point. But to close the gap between who I was today and who I could be tomorrow.
In my consulting career, I’d learned a principle that applies perfectly here: you don’t benchmark against competitors to feel bad about yourself. You benchmark to understand what’s possible, then you build your own strategy for getting there. The goal isn’t to be them. The goal is to be the best version of you.
That Frankfurt night, I didn’t know any of this. I just knew I wanted to keep going. The reasons came later. The framework came later. The understanding of why the comparison trap is so destructive and how to manage it — all of that came later, through reading, through practice, through years of figuring this out the hard way.
But the decision to put the laptop down, pick the cards back up, and practice for another thirty minutes instead of quitting? That happened right there, in a hotel room, with nobody watching and nobody to tell me it was the right call.
It was the right call. It’s always the right call. The only way out of “everyone is better than me” is through. Through the awkward phase. Through the inconsistency. Through the frustration. Through the nights when nothing works and the mornings when you don’t want to pick up the deck.
If you’re in that phase right now, let me say what nobody on YouTube will tell you: this is normal. This is where everyone starts. And the people you’re watching? They were here too. They just didn’t record it.