I asked the wrong question for months.
Every time I met someone who was good at card magic — at magic shops, at gatherings, online — I’d ask some version of the same thing: “How did you get so good? What’s the secret to improving? What advice would you give someone who’s just starting out?”
And every time, I’d get some version of the same answer.
“Just keep practicing.”
“Love what you do and the rest follows.”
“Practice, practice, practice.”
“You just have to put in the time.”
I’d nod, thank them, and walk away feeling like I’d been handed a fortune cookie instead of a roadmap. Because “just practice” isn’t advice. It’s a tautology. It’s like telling someone who’s lost to “just find the right direction.” Technically true. Practically useless.
At first, I thought these performers were being evasive. Maybe they didn’t want to share their real secrets. Maybe there was a competitive advantage they were protecting. Maybe the magic community had an unspoken code of keeping newcomers at arm’s length until they’d proved their dedication.
But as I kept asking — different people, different skill levels, different backgrounds — a pattern emerged that was more interesting than evasion. They weren’t withholding information. They genuinely didn’t know what to tell me. The question would land, and I’d watch them think about it, really think, and come up empty. Not because they were unintelligent or inarticulate, but because the knowledge I was asking about wasn’t the kind of knowledge that lives in words.
A violinist who has been playing since age five doesn’t know why they phrase a passage a certain way. A basketball player who has been shooting free throws since childhood doesn’t know why their release point is where it is. A card magician who has been practicing for twenty years doesn’t know why their hands move the way they do during a particular technique. The knowledge is in their body, in their reflexes, in neural pathways that were built over thousands of hours of practice and have long since dropped below the threshold of conscious awareness.
You can’t articulate what you can’t see. And these experts couldn’t see their own expertise because it had become invisible to them.
I stumbled onto this insight accidentally. I was at a magic lecture — one of those events where a skilled performer demonstrates and teaches their material. The performer was excellent. His card work was flawless, his timing impeccable, his audience management effortless. During the Q&A, someone asked him how he developed his particular style of handling. He paused. Thought about it. And said, “I don’t know, really. I just… handle them.”
The audience laughed, as if he was being modest. But I was watching his face, and I saw something different. He wasn’t being modest. He was being honest. He genuinely did not know what made his handling distinctive. It was something his body did, not something his conscious mind had designed.
That moment was a turning point.
Because I realized that my entire approach to learning from experts was flawed. I was trying to learn by asking. And asking is the wrong tool for extracting knowledge that exists below the level of consciousness.
This wasn’t a new problem in my life, actually. I’d encountered a version of it in consulting. When you interview executives about why their company is successful, they give you narratives that sound plausible but are often incomplete or even wrong. They attribute their success to the things they consciously decided to do, while the real competitive advantages are often embedded in processes, culture, and habits that nobody thinks about because they’re too familiar to notice.
Good consultants know this. You don’t learn how a company really works by asking executives. You learn by observing operations. By walking the factory floor. By sitting in meetings and watching how decisions actually get made, rather than listening to how people describe their decision-making process.
I started to wonder: could the same approach work for magic?
Instead of asking good performers how they got good, what if I watched them? Really watched them? Not their performances — that’s the finished product. But their practice. Their process. Their habits. The way they approach learning a new technique. The choices they make about what to work on and when to move forward and how to allocate their practice time.
The shift from asking to observing changed everything.
I started paying attention to things I’d never noticed before. When I watched a skilled performer practice, I noticed they didn’t start with their strongest material and work forward. They started with whatever they were worst at. They dove straight into the thing they couldn’t do yet, before their energy and focus were depleted by easier stuff. This was the opposite of what I’d been doing — I’d been warming up with comfortable material and getting to the hard stuff late in the session, when I was already mentally tired.
I noticed that the best practitioners I watched didn’t practice for long stretches at high intensity. They had a rhythm — intense focus, then rest, then intense focus again. They seemed to know instinctively when they were no longer making progress and would stop, take a break, come back fresh. Meanwhile, I’d been grinding through two-hour sessions where the last forty-five minutes were essentially useless repetition with diminishing concentration.
I noticed that skilled performers had a different relationship with failure. When they dropped a card or flashed a move in practice, they didn’t react with frustration. They reacted with curiosity. What happened there? Why did the card slip? What was different about this attempt compared to the last one? Their mistakes were data, not setbacks.
And I noticed something else — something subtle but, in retrospect, the most important observation of all. The performers who seemed to improve fastest weren’t doing the same thing day after day. They were constantly adjusting. Changing the difficulty level. Trying variations. Moving to harder material before they’d completely mastered easier material. They were restless in a productive way, always pushing slightly beyond their comfort zone, never settling into the groove of repetition.
These observations didn’t come from asking a single question. They came from watching dozens of people across months of paying attention. And they contradicted almost everything that conventional wisdom says about how to practice.
Conventional wisdom says: master the basics before moving on. What I observed: the best practitioners moved on before mastering the basics, and somehow the basics improved anyway.
Conventional wisdom says: practice makes perfect through repetition. What I observed: pure repetition seemed to plateau quickly; it was variation and challenge that drove improvement.
Conventional wisdom says: start with what you know and build up to what you don’t know. What I observed: the best practitioners started with what they didn’t know and used what they knew as a cooldown.
I was building a model. Not from anyone’s advice — they couldn’t give advice that matched what they actually did. From observation. From pattern recognition. From the same analytical toolkit I used to decode how companies actually operated, as opposed to how they said they operated.
Much later, I would discover that there was a name for this approach. In the literature on skill acquisition, it’s called “modeling” — the process of observing what experts actually do (as opposed to what they say they do) and extracting the implicit principles that drive their superior performance. It’s rooted in the insight that expertise often lives in the unconscious — that the things that make top performers great are precisely the things they can’t articulate, because those things were never consciously learned in the first place.
I would also discover that I wasn’t the first person to figure this out. There were researchers and practitioners who had spent years systematically studying the gap between what experts do and what experts think they do. Who had decoded the practice patterns of elite performers across multiple disciplines and extracted universal principles that could be taught to anyone.
But that discovery — the books, the frameworks, the systematic methodology — was still ahead of me at this point in the story. All I knew at this moment was that asking experts had been a dead end, and watching them had opened a door.
The day I stopped asking for advice was the day my learning actually began.
Not because advice is worthless — there are people in this field whose written insights would later transform my understanding of performance. But because the specific kind of knowledge I needed at that stage — the knowledge of how to practice, how to structure my learning, how to allocate my energy and attention — wasn’t the kind of knowledge that experts could transmit through conversation.
It was the kind of knowledge that had to be decoded from observation. Extracted from behavior. Reverse-engineered from the gap between what experts said and what they did.
And for a strategy consultant — someone trained to look at systems, identify patterns, and build models from observed behavior — this turned out to be the perfect challenge.
I didn’t know it yet, but the shift from asking to observing would lead me to a practice methodology that would change not just my magic but my entire understanding of how skills are built. A methodology based not on inspiration or talent or mystical “feel,” but on systematic observation, testable principles, and structured implementation.
The experts couldn’t tell me how they got good. So I watched. And what I saw, once I knew how to look for it, was a system hiding in plain sight.