Let me tell you what I thought magic was before I knew anything about magic.
Magic was a man in a top hat pulling a rabbit out of it. Magic was “pick a card, any card” followed by a reveal that was clever but not impressive. Magic was the entertainment at a children’s birthday party, squeezed between the cake and the party bags. Magic was your uncle making a coin “disappear” behind your ear, and you pretending to be amazed because you were seven and that’s what seven-year-olds do.
Magic was, in my adult mind, a solved problem. A relic. Something from a simpler time that hadn’t evolved because it didn’t need to — it had found its level, and that level was somewhere between juggling at a street fair and a puppet show.
I held this belief with the comfortable certainty of someone who had never, not once, actually investigated whether it was true.
This is what prejudice looks like when it’s dressed in sophistication. I wasn’t angry at magic. I wasn’t threatened by it. I simply knew that it was a trivial thing, the way I knew that professional wrestling was scripted or that fast food was unhealthy. It was background knowledge, unquestioned and unexamined, sitting in a mental filing cabinet that I never opened because there was no reason to.
Here’s what I’ve learned since: the less you know about something, the simpler it looks from the outside.
When I started my journey with cards in that hotel room, I thought I was entering a small world. A hobby world. A world with a low ceiling, where you learn a few tricks, impress a few friends, and that’s about as far as it goes. I thought the skill gap between a beginner and an expert was like the gap between a recreational jogger and a marathon runner — significant but comprehensible.
I was wrong in a way that still surprises me.
The world I’d stumbled into wasn’t a small room. It was a building with dozens of floors, and I’d been looking at it from outside, seeing only the ground level. The birthday party magic, the uncle’s coin trick, the man in the top hat — that was the lobby. And I’d concluded, from the lobby, that I understood the entire structure.
The deeper I went into my research — and the consultant in me couldn’t help but research — the more I realized how vast and deep this art form actually was.
I discovered that magic has a documented history going back to at least the 1500s. That there are texts and manuscripts describing techniques that have been developed, refined, debated, and passed down through generations of practitioners for five hundred years. That there is a literary tradition in magic as extensive as in any academic discipline — thousands of books, journals, monographs, and treatises dedicated to every conceivable aspect of the craft.
I discovered that there are people who have spent their entire lives — forty, fifty, sixty years — refining a single routine. Not a show. A single routine. Five minutes of performance that represents decades of thought about every finger position, every word spoken, every beat of timing, every psychological principle at play in the audience’s mind.
I discovered that the great practitioners of this art are some of the most intelligent, creative, and psychologically astute people I’ve ever encountered — through their writing, at least, since at this point I hadn’t met any of them in person. People like Dai Vernon, who spent a lifetime pursuing perfection in card magic. Like Juan Tamariz, whose work on misdirection draws on everything from theater to cognitive psychology to philosophy. Like Eugene Burger, who brought a level of theatrical sophistication to magic that would impress any drama school professor.
These were not children’s entertainers. These were serious artists working in a discipline that most of the world — most of me, until recently — had written off as trivial.
The moment the scale of my error really hit me was when I started reading about the history. I’m the kind of person who, when I get interested in something, wants to understand where it came from. In consulting, we always start with the industry history before analyzing the current landscape. So I applied the same approach to magic.
And I found a history that was staggering.
Magic as a performing art has connections to ancient religious ceremonies, to the courts of European monarchs, to the birth of modern theater. Robert-Houdin, who is often called the father of modern magic, was performing in the nineteenth century in a way that would be recognizable to any contemporary performer. Before him, magicians performed in fairs and markets in ways that connected to traditions going back centuries.
The Cups and Balls — one of the oldest known tricks — appears in depictions from ancient Rome. Two thousand years. This art form predates most of what we consider serious culture.
And the technical sophistication. I started reading about the work of people like Erdnase, who wrote “The Expert at the Card Table” in 1902 under a pseudonym that has never been definitively identified. This book describes card techniques of such precision and subtlety that card workers over a hundred years later are still studying it, still finding new insights, still debating its contents. A single book, written by an anonymous author, that has generated more sustained academic-level analysis than many works of recognized literature.
Or Hofzinser, the Austrian card magician — an Austrian, like me — whose work in the nineteenth century established principles that contemporary performers still build upon. He was creating card effects of such ingenuity that they remain in professional repertoires today, over 150 years later.
My “magic is for kids” belief was like standing in front of the Louvre and saying “painting is just coloring.” It was a conclusion drawn from such a limited data set that it wasn’t even wrong in an interesting way. It was just ignorant.
And here’s what stung the most: I prided myself on being analytical. On being the kind of person who questions assumptions, who digs beneath surface-level understanding, who doesn’t accept the obvious answer. That was my whole career — helping companies see past their assumptions to the deeper strategic reality.
And yet, when it came to magic, I’d done exactly what I warned my clients never to do. I’d taken a superficial impression, never questioned it, and built an entire worldview on it.
Ken Weber, in his book “Maximum Entertainment,” makes a distinction that hit me hard when I first read it. He describes what he calls the Hierarchy of Mystery Entertainment. At the bottom are puzzles — tricks where the audience thinks “I could do that if I knew the secret.” In the middle are tricks — demonstrations of perceived skill that earn respect. At the top are extraordinary moments — performances that produce not curiosity about the method but genuine, unanalyzable wonder.
Most of what the general public sees of magic — the birthday party performer, the TV special, the street magician hassling tourists — lives at the puzzle level. Maybe the trick level. And most people, like me, base their entire evaluation of the art form on those encounters.
But extraordinary moments exist. They’re rare, and they tend to happen in environments that non-magicians don’t frequent — magic conventions, private shows, intimate performances where the conditions are right. When you experience one, when you see a performer create a moment of genuine, unexplainable wonder in another person’s mind, you understand immediately that this is not children’s entertainment. This is something profound.
I haven’t experienced many of those moments yet. I’m early in my journey. But even the glimpses I’ve caught — in videos, in descriptions, in the writing of people who have been at this for decades — have been enough to show me what’s possible.
And what’s possible is so far beyond what I thought was possible that I’m still processing the gap.
Here’s what I want to say to anyone who shares the belief I held for most of my life: I understand why you think that. The evidence of your direct experience probably supports it. Most of the magic you’ve encountered was probably mediocre, because most of everything in any field is mediocre. But the ceiling of this art form is stratospheric. The best practitioners are operating at a level of skill, creativity, and psychological sophistication that would earn respect in any discipline.
The reason you haven’t seen it isn’t because it doesn’t exist. It’s because the best magic often happens in contexts where the general public isn’t invited, and because the difference between great magic and mediocre magic isn’t visible to someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at.
I didn’t know what I was looking at. Now I’m learning. And every week, I discover another floor of the building I’d written off based on the lobby.
There’s a particular kind of excitement that comes from realizing you were wrong about something in a way that opens doors rather than closing them. Being wrong about magic didn’t cost me anything except decades of potential enjoyment. But realizing I was wrong gave me access to a world I never knew existed — a world of craft, history, psychology, and artistry that I’m now exploring with the enthusiasm of someone who’s found a hidden room in a house they’ve lived in for years.
Magic isn’t for kids. It was never for kids. Kids happen to enjoy it, the way kids enjoy music and stories and theater. But the art form itself is as deep, as demanding, and as rewarding as anything I’ve encountered in a life spent studying complex systems.
I was just looking at the wrong floor.