The first time I told someone I was learning magic, they smiled the way people smile at a child who says they want to be an astronaut.
It was a colleague. We were at a conference dinner — one of those corporate events where the conversation bounces between quarterly targets and weekend hobbies. Someone mentioned golf. Someone mentioned running. Someone mentioned their kid’s football league. And then it was my turn, and without really thinking about what I was saying, I mentioned that I’d been teaching myself card magic.
The smile. That specific, slightly patronizing, slightly amused smile. “Oh, that’s fun,” she said. “Like, for parties?”
I felt the heat rise in my face. Not because she was being unkind — she wasn’t. She was being exactly as dismissive as I would have been a year earlier. But hearing it reflected back at me, that casual reduction of something I was pouring hours into every night, stung in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.” And changed the subject.
I drove back to my hotel that night thinking about age. About starting late. About the quiet, persistent narrative that says certain things need to begin in childhood or not at all.
It’s a narrative I knew well from the music world. I’d heard it about drums, about piano, about every instrument: the greats started at five, at seven, at ten. By the time they were adults, they had fifteen thousand hours of practice behind them. If you’re starting in your forties, the math simply doesn’t work. You’ll never catch up. You’ll always be the amateur.
And now I was hearing the same narrative about magic. Every biography I read seemed to start the same way: “He received his first magic kit at age eight…” or “She saw a magician at a birthday party when she was six and never looked back…” The great ones were always precocious. Always young. Always wired for this from the beginning.
Where did that leave me? A strategy consultant in his forties who’d bought a deck of cards on a whim and was practicing in hotel rooms between business meetings?
I’ll tell you where it left me: it left me in a very specific kind of doubt. Not doubt about whether I enjoyed it — I did, enormously. Not doubt about whether it was worth my time — any activity that replaced phone-scrolling with focused practice was worth my time by definition. The doubt was about the ceiling. How good could I actually get? Was there a hard limit to what an adult beginner could achieve? Was I investing thousands of hours into something that would always, inevitably, top out at a level that a talented teenager could surpass in a year?
These questions ate at me for months. And because I’m a consultant — because pattern-recognition and research are literally what I do for a living — I started looking for answers.
What I found surprised me.
The first thing I discovered was that the “you have to start young” narrative is more complex than it appears. Yes, early exposure matters for some skills. Yes, childhood neuroplasticity gives young learners certain advantages, particularly in motor skills and language acquisition. But the research on expert performance — the actual scientific research, not the popular mythology — tells a more nuanced story.
There’s a body of work in skill acquisition science that distinguishes between different types of learning advantages. Children have advantages in implicit learning — absorbing patterns and movements without conscious analysis. Adults have advantages in explicit learning — understanding principles, building mental models, applying systematic approaches. Children learn by doing. Adults learn by understanding why, and then doing.
This distinction turned out to be crucial.
Because what I was discovering in my own practice was that my adult brain — the same analytical brain that my colleague’s smile had made me feel embarrassed about — was actually an asset. I wasn’t just repeating moves mindlessly. I was building frameworks. I was analyzing what worked and what didn’t. I was applying the same systematic thinking I used in consulting to break down complex techniques into component parts.
When I watched a card sleight in a tutorial, I didn’t just try to copy it. I thought about the biomechanics. Which muscles were involved? What was the kinetic chain? Where was the leverage point? What was the visual geometry from the audience’s perspective versus my perspective? These were questions that a child learner would never think to ask — but they gave me shortcuts that pure repetition couldn’t provide.
I started to realize that starting late wasn’t just a disadvantage to be overcome. It was a different starting position with its own set of tools.
The consulting brain gave me something else, too: the ability to learn from other people’s experience efficiently. When I read about a concept in a book, I could immediately connect it to principles I already knew from other domains. When a magic instructor talked about misdirection, I heard echoes of what I knew about attention management in presentations. When someone explained the psychology of audience perception, I recognized cognitive biases I’d studied in behavioral economics.
Everything connected. The decades of life and work experience I’d accumulated weren’t wasted years of not-learning-magic. They were a foundation that made learning magic faster and richer than it would have been if I’d started at eight with no framework for understanding what I was doing.
None of this means that starting young doesn’t matter. Of course it does. A teenager who starts practicing card magic at fourteen and practices daily for ten years will, at twenty-four, have a level of muscle memory and intuitive fluency that I will probably never match. That’s just math.
But “never match their muscle memory” is not the same as “never be good.” It’s not even the same as “never be excellent.” Because excellence in magic — as I was learning from every book I read — is not primarily about technical facility. It’s about presentation. About psychology. About understanding what your audience is experiencing. About choosing the right material, framing it the right way, and performing it with the right emotional energy.
And those skills? Those are adult skills. Those are skills that require life experience, emotional intelligence, the ability to read a room, the ability to connect with strangers, the ability to tell a story that resonates. A twenty-year-old with perfect finger technique and no life experience is going to struggle with those skills. A forty-something consultant who has spent two decades reading rooms and connecting with people has a head start that no amount of childhood practice can replicate.
I’m not saying this to be self-congratulatory. I’m saying it because I wish someone had said it to me during those months of doubt. I wish someone had told me: yes, you’re starting late. Yes, the kids on YouTube will always have better finger speed. But the thing you’re learning isn’t finger speed. Finger speed is the entry ticket. The actual art — the thing that makes people gasp, that makes them remember, that transforms a trick into an experience — that’s built from everything you’ve lived and learned and understood about human beings.
Ken Weber, whose book “Maximum Entertainment” became one of my most important reads, makes this point explicitly. He writes about how the personality of the performer is the message, not the tricks. He describes a moment where a non-magician — a woman named Mary Ann Smith with zero technical skill — captivated a room of professional magicians with nothing but warmth, presence, and the ability to connect with people. She outperformed every magician in the room that night.
That story demolished whatever remained of my “too late” fears. Because Mary Ann Smith wasn’t winning on technique. She was winning on exactly the things that life experience gives you. The things that age gives you. The things that a career in rooms full of strangers gives you.
I started to reframe my late start. Not as a deficit to overcome but as a different path with its own advantages. I didn’t have twenty years of muscle memory. I did have twenty years of learning how to read people, how to communicate complex ideas simply, how to hold attention in a meeting, how to project confidence even when I was uncertain.
Was I ever going to be the fastest card handler on YouTube? No. Was I ever going to win a technical competition against someone who’d been practicing since childhood? Probably not. But was I going to be able to stand in front of a room and create a moment that people remembered? That was a different question entirely. And the answer to that question had nothing to do with when I started and everything to do with what I brought.
To anyone reading this who is considering starting something new and worrying about their age: the question isn’t “am I too old to start?” The question is “what do I bring to this that a younger starter doesn’t?”
The answer, if you think about it honestly, is probably a lot more than you expect.
I still practice in hotel rooms. I’m still working on techniques that teenagers do effortlessly. I still have nights where my fingers forget everything and I feel like a beginner all over again. But I also have nights where I combine a technique with a story, or a presentation idea, or a psychological insight that I learned from reading about audience behavior — and something clicks that couldn’t have clicked without the decades of experience I brought to the table.
Starting late is a real thing. It has real consequences. But it’s not the same as starting behind. It’s starting from a different place. And different, I’m learning, can be its own kind of advantage.