There is a chasm between practicing alone in a hotel room and performing for another human being. I knew this intellectually. I did not understand it viscerally until the night I tried to cross it.
I’d been practicing for months at that point. Every evening in the hotel room, every spare moment, building up a small repertoire of effects that I could execute with reasonable consistency. Reasonable being the operative word — in my room, alone, with no one watching, I could get through most of my material without dropping anything or flashing a move. I felt ready. Or at least ready enough.
The occasion was informal. A small gathering. Friends. A setting where failure would be embarrassing but not catastrophic. Someone asked what I’d been up to, and I mentioned — with what I hoped was casual confidence — that I’d been learning some card magic. Would anyone like to see something?
The next thirty minutes taught me more than the previous six months of practice combined.
Here’s what I discovered: performing is not the same activity as practicing. It’s not practice with an audience bolted on. It’s a fundamentally different cognitive task that uses different mental resources, demands different kinds of attention, and creates pressure that hotel room rehearsal cannot simulate.
The first thing that hit me was the attention. Not my attention — theirs. When you practice alone, there’s no one watching your hands. No one looking at your face. No one tracking your movements. The moment I had eyes on me — real, curious, expectant human eyes — my body responded as if I’d walked into a job interview I hadn’t prepared for. My heart rate jumped. My hands, which had been steady and confident in private, developed a slight tremor that I could feel but couldn’t control.
The second thing was the management problem. In my hotel room, I had one perspective to worry about: my own. I could see my hands from above, I knew where every card was, I knew the timing of every move. But now there were multiple perspectives. Someone was sitting to my left and could see my hands from an angle I’d never considered. Someone was standing behind me. Someone was leaning in close. Every person in the room had a different sightline, and I was suddenly, painfully aware that my “invisible” moves might not be invisible from every angle.
This was the challenge I’d read about in Felix’s own backstory — the intertwining of multiple processes that need to happen simultaneously during performance. There is what the audience sees. There is what I, as the performer, need to do to make the effect work. And there are the props themselves, which require specific handling. These three processes need to run in parallel, and they frequently conflict with each other.
In my hotel room, I only had to manage one of these processes — my own handling. In front of people, all three collided at once, and my brain simply couldn’t keep up.
The third thing — and this was the most devastating — was the realization that I had no idea how to talk while doing things with my hands.
I’d practiced the moves in silence. Hours and hours of silent repetition, perfecting the physical technique. But I’d never practiced saying anything while doing the moves. And it turns out that speaking and performing sleight of hand simultaneously is like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while solving a math problem. The moment I opened my mouth to say something — anything, even “watch this” — my hands stuttered. And the moment I focused on my hands, my speech dried up.
I filled the gaps with the worst kinds of verbal filler. “Okay, so, um…” and “Now what I’m going to do is…” and long, painful silences where I stared at the cards and tried to remember what came next. The performance had no flow. It was a sequence of isolated moments connected by awkward pauses and mumbled narration.
I could feel the audience’s energy shifting. Not to hostility — these were friends, and they were being generous. But from curiosity to patience. That’s a subtle but unmistakable shift. Curiosity says “show me something amazing.” Patience says “I’ll wait until you’re done because I like you.”
I didn’t want patience. I wanted amazement. And I was getting patience because I was giving them nothing to be amazed about. The effects themselves — when I managed to execute them without fumbling — were fine. Some of them actually landed. But the experience of watching me do them was painful, because I was so clearly struggling that the audience’s attention was on my discomfort rather than on the magic.
This is something I’d later understand much more deeply through reading about performance. Ken Weber describes how the audience wants to see Superman, not Clark Kent. They want confidence, command, control. When you show them someone who is nervous, uncertain, and fumbling, their empathy kicks in. They start rooting for you to get through it, the way you root for a nervous speaker to finish their presentation. And rooting for someone is a generous emotion, but it’s the opposite of astonishment. You can’t be amazed by someone you feel sorry for.
I was generating sympathy, not wonder.
By the halfway point, I’d abandoned several effects that I’d planned to do because I could feel they were beyond what I could manage under pressure. I simplified. I shortened. I rushed through things, which made them worse. I skipped the moments that needed time and breath and silence because I was desperate to get to the end.
When it was over, people clapped. They said nice things. One person said “that was really cool” with the emphasis on “really,” which is what people say when they’re trying to be supportive rather than when they’re genuinely impressed. Someone else asked how long I’d been learning, and when I told them, they said “wow, you’re doing great for just a few months,” which is the performance equivalent of “you have a great personality.”
I drove back to the hotel and sat on the bed and felt the specific, burning shame of having failed at something I cared about in front of people I respected.
And then I did something that surprised me. I picked up the cards and started practicing.
Not because I was disciplined. Not because I had some grand philosophy about resilience and getting back on the horse. I practiced because I could see, with painful clarity, exactly what I needed to work on. The performance had been a diagnostic. Every flaw, every weakness, every gap in my preparation had been exposed under the light of actual human attention. And my consultant brain — the same analytical engine that diagnosed business problems for a living — was already categorizing the failures and prioritizing the fixes.
Problem one: I couldn’t talk and perform simultaneously. Solution: start practicing every move with verbal accompaniment, even if it’s just narrating what I’m doing.
Problem two: I’d never considered multiple sightlines. Solution: practice in front of a mirror at different angles. Better yet, set up my phone camera at the angle where the audience would sit.
Problem three: I had no script. Nothing planned to say. Just a vague sense of “I’ll figure out the talking part when I get there.” Solution: write something. Even if it’s simple. Even if it’s just three sentences per effect. Have words prepared so my brain doesn’t have to simultaneously improvise speech and execute technique.
Problem four: I rushed. When the pressure hit, I sped up, which made everything worse. Solution: this one was harder. This was about managing my own nervous system, about learning to slow down under pressure, about trusting that the audience could handle a pause even if my anxiety couldn’t.
I wrote all of this down on a hotel notepad. Four problems. Four solutions. A diagnostic that would have taken months of solo practice to identify had been revealed in thirty minutes of performing.
That night I understood something that would become a core belief of this entire blog: practice is where you build skills. Performance is where you discover what you actually need to build.
They’re not the same thing. They feed each other, but they do different jobs. And no amount of hotel room practice — no matter how diligent, no matter how many hours — can substitute for the brutal, clarifying experience of doing it in front of real people.
I performed again about two weeks later. Different gathering, different people. It was better. Not good — better. I had some scripted lines. I’d adjusted my angles. I could talk and do basic moves at the same time, though anything complex still required me to go quiet. I still rushed. I still fumbled one effect. But the audience’s energy was different. Instead of patience, there were moments — brief, fleeting, but real — of genuine engagement. A couple of people leaned in. One person said “wait, what?” with actual surprise in her voice.
Those moments were worth more than a thousand hours of solo practice. Not because they proved I was good — I wasn’t. But because they showed me what “good” felt like. The texture of it. The audience response that meant something real was happening. A compass heading I could aim for.
My first performance was a disaster. I mean that without self-pity and without false modesty. It was objectively bad. The techniques were shaky, the presentation was nonexistent, the experience for the audience was one of sympathetic patience rather than astonishment.
And it was the single most important evening of my entire magic journey. Because it showed me — with a clarity that no book, no tutorial, no amount of mirror practice could match — exactly where I was, exactly where I needed to go, and exactly what I needed to work on to get there.
Every performer I’ve since read about confirms this. The gap between practice and performance is universal. Everyone goes through it. The only question is whether you let it stop you or let it teach you.
I let it teach me. And I’ve been learning from that lesson ever since.