After the wreckage of my first performance, I had a choice.
The obvious choice was to file magic under “things I tried and moved on from.” That’s what most adults do when a new hobby reveals itself to be harder than expected. They had fun, they learned a little, they’ll mention it at dinner parties as a mildly interesting anecdote — “I spent a few months learning card tricks once, it was fun” — and that’s the end of it. No shame in that. The world is full of abandoned hobbies, and most of them deserved to be abandoned.
But something wouldn’t let me quit. Not discipline — I don’t think discipline had anything to do with it. It was more like irritation. A very specific, very familiar kind of irritation that I recognized from my consulting career.
When a strategy project hits a wall — when the data doesn’t cooperate, when the client resists the findings, when the elegant framework collapses against messy reality — there’s a moment where you can either retreat to something safer or push through the discomfort and figure out what’s actually going on. The best consultants I’d worked with never retreated. They leaned in. They got curious about the wall itself. What is this obstacle made of? Why is it here? What does it tell me about the system I’m trying to understand?
That’s what I felt after my first performance. Not “I should give up” but “what is this wall made of?” Not “I’m bad at this” but “why am I bad at this, specifically, and what would I need to change?”
The irritation wasn’t with magic. It was with the gap between what I could feel was possible and what I was currently delivering. I’d seen enough great performances online to know that what I was attempting — connecting with people through wonder — was achievable. I just wasn’t there yet. And the distance between here and there felt, to my consultant brain, like a solvable problem.
So I made a promise to myself. Not a New Year’s resolution. Not a vague intention to “practice more” or “get better.” A structural commitment. The kind of thing I’d recommend to a client.
The promise had three parts.
First: I would perform regularly. Not just practice. Perform. In front of actual people, in actual social situations, with actual stakes. I would seek out opportunities to show someone what I was working on at least once a week, even if the audience was just one person, even if the venue was just a kitchen table after dinner.
This part of the promise was directly inspired by what my first performance had taught me. Practice and performance were different skills, and I could only develop the performance skill by performing. No amount of hotel room repetition would fix the problems I’d discovered — the sightline blindness, the inability to talk and move simultaneously, the rush-under-pressure reflex. Those could only be addressed in the field.
Second: I would study the craft systematically. Not just watch YouTube tutorials. Not just learn tricks one at a time. I would treat magic the way I treated any domain I needed to master professionally: find the best books, identify the foundational frameworks, build a mental model of the discipline from the ground up.
I’d already started doing this intuitively — buying books, reading about history, watching performances analytically. But the promise made it deliberate. I started keeping a reading list. I started taking structured notes. I started building what I now recognize as my own curriculum, a self-directed education in performance craft that drew on the same learning methods I used in consulting.
Third — and this was the part that surprised even me — I would approach this with the same seriousness I brought to my professional work. Not the same time commitment — I couldn’t afford that, and I had a career to maintain. But the same quality of attention. The same rigor. The same refusal to accept “good enough” when “better” was clearly possible.
This third promise was the one that changed everything.
Because up until that point, I’d been treating magic as a hobby. A pleasant distraction. Something to do in the evenings. And there’s nothing wrong with hobbies — but hobbies have an implicit permission structure built in. They give you permission to be mediocre. They give you permission to skip practice when you’re not in the mood. They give you permission to plateau and call it “enjoying the journey.”
When I committed to bringing professional-quality attention to my magic practice, that permission structure collapsed. I couldn’t skip practice because I was tired — I wouldn’t skip a client meeting because I was tired. I couldn’t settle for an effect that was “pretty good” — I wouldn’t deliver a strategy deck that was “pretty good.” I couldn’t ignore a weakness because fixing it was uncomfortable — I wouldn’t ignore a flaw in a business model because addressing it was hard.
The standards I applied to my consulting work — thoroughness, precision, relentless self-critique, willingness to tear something apart and rebuild it — became the standards I applied to my practice.
This sounds exhausting. It sounds like I’m describing a joyless grind, all discipline and no pleasure. But here’s what actually happened: the seriousness made it more enjoyable, not less.
When I practiced casually, my sessions were aimless. I’d noodle around with moves I already knew, feel vaguely unsatisfied, and put the cards down after twenty minutes. When I practiced seriously — with specific goals, with a focus on weaknesses, with a commitment to pushing past the comfortable — my sessions had structure, momentum, and measurable progress. I could feel myself getting better. Not every session, but across sessions. And feeling yourself get better at something is one of the purest forms of satisfaction I’ve ever experienced.
The promise also changed how I consumed information about magic. Instead of passively watching YouTube, I started actively studying. I’d watch a performance three times: once for the effect, once for the technique (what I could discern without knowing the method), and once for the presentation — the words, the timing, the body language, the audience management. I started noticing things I’d never noticed before. How a great performer’s hands moved differently during the “secret” moments. How their eyes directed the audience’s attention. How their speech patterns created rhythm and emphasis.
I was applying consulting methodology to magic. Observe, analyze, identify patterns, extract principles, test applications. It felt natural because it was natural — this was how my brain worked. I’d just never given it permission to work this way on something outside of business.
Within a few months of making the promise, my practice sessions looked nothing like they had before. I had a warm-up routine. I had specific techniques I was drilling. I had a small repertoire of effects that I was refining for performance. I had a notebook — a physical notebook, not a digital one — where I tracked what I practiced, what I performed, what worked, and what didn’t.
The notebook was a game-changer. Something about the act of writing down “performed the ambitious card for Sarah and Mark at dinner. The second phase was clean but the third phase flashed. Eye contact was better than last time. Need to work on the transition between phases” — something about that level of documentation forced a quality of self-reflection that casual practice never generated.
I was turning myself into a case study. The same way I’d analyze a client’s business, I was analyzing my own development. And the data was telling me things I couldn’t have seen without it: patterns in my mistakes, trends in my improvement, correlations between specific practice activities and specific performance outcomes.
Was I overthinking it? Maybe. My musician friends would probably say I was sucking the joy out of a creative pursuit by turning it into a consulting project. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t a natural performer. I didn’t have instincts honed by years of being on stage. I needed frameworks. I needed structure. I needed to understand why something worked before I could do it consistently.
And that approach — systematic, analytical, documented — would eventually lead me to the practice methodology books that transformed not just my magic but my understanding of how skill acquisition works. It would lead me to the discovery that there were other people who had studied this problem — the problem of how people get good at things — and had developed frameworks that were far more sophisticated than anything I’d cobbled together on my own.
But that discovery was still months away. At the moment of the promise, all I knew was that I was done treating this as a casual hobby. I was going to take it seriously. I was going to bring the best of my professional self to it. And I was going to see how far that approach could take me.
The promise didn’t guarantee success. It didn’t make me talented overnight. It didn’t eliminate the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be. What it did was convert a vague desire (“I want to get better at this”) into a concrete system (“here is how I will get better at this, step by step, measured and accountable”).
Systems beat goals. That’s something I’d learned in consulting and would later read about in the practice methodology literature. Goals are wishes. Systems are architectures. Goals say “I want to be good.” Systems say “here is the structure that will make me good, whether I feel motivated on any given day or not.”
My promise was a system. And systems, once established, have a momentum of their own. They carry you forward even when inspiration fades, even when progress stalls, even when the voice in your head says you’re too old, too late, too far behind.
That promise, made in a hotel room after a humiliating performance, is the reason this blog exists. Not talent. Not luck. Not some mystical calling to the art of magic.
A system. Built by a consultant. Applied to cards.