I spent over a decade helping companies figure out why they were stuck.
That was the job, reduced to its simplest form. A company would be doing everything “right” — working hard, following best practices, investing in the same tools as their competitors — and yet they weren’t growing the way they expected. They’d call in consultants like me, and my job was to find the invisible thing that was holding them back.
Nine times out of ten, the problem wasn’t what they were doing. It was how they were thinking about what they were doing. Their mental model of their own business was wrong, or at least incomplete, and that flawed model was generating flawed decisions that looked perfectly rational from the inside.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the exact same problem I would later encounter in magic.
Let me back up.
By the time I started seriously learning card magic — sitting in hotel rooms across Europe with a deck of cards and tutorial videos from ellusionist.com playing on my laptop — I had been a strategy and innovation consultant for years. I traveled roughly two hundred nights a year. I couldn’t bring my music gear on the road, which is how the cards entered my life in the first place. But what I could bring, without realizing it, was a way of thinking.
Consultants are trained to do a few things very well. We ask “why” instead of “how.” We look for systems, not symptoms. We question assumptions that everyone else takes for granted. We look at what people actually do, not what they say they do. And we are pathologically suspicious of conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom is usually the reason our clients are stuck in the first place.
These skills, it turns out, transfer beautifully to learning magic. Not the sleight of hand — that’s a physical skill that requires its own type of training. But the meta-skill of learning itself. The strategy of how you approach skill acquisition. That’s where consulting gave me an unfair advantage I didn’t even recognize for months.
Here’s what I mean.
The “Why” Question
In consulting, the first question is never “What should we do?” It’s “Why is the current approach producing the results it’s producing?” You have to understand the system before you can change it.
When I started learning card magic, I noticed that most learning resources — tutorials, DVDs, online courses — were structured around “how.” How to do this technique. How to perform this effect. How to hold the cards. And that’s useful, obviously. You need to know the mechanics.
But I kept running into a problem that the “how” resources didn’t address. I’d learn a technique, practice it exactly as taught, and still not get the results the instructor was getting. The gap between their version and my version wasn’t in the mechanics. I was doing the same physical movements. The gap was somewhere else — in something the instructors weren’t teaching because they probably weren’t aware of it themselves.
So I started asking “why” instead of “how.” Why does this technique feel awkward when I do it but effortless when they do it? Why do some practice sessions produce breakthroughs and others produce nothing? Why do certain performers improve steadily while others plateau after a few months despite practicing the same amount?
These are systems questions. And systems questions lead to systems answers — the kind of answers that change everything at once rather than tweaking one small thing at a time.
Pattern Recognition
Here’s the other consulting skill that proved invaluable: pattern recognition across different contexts.
When you work with dozens of companies across different industries, you start to see the same patterns everywhere. A manufacturing company and a tech startup might have completely different products, different markets, different cultures — but the structural reason they’re underperforming is often eerily similar. They’re optimizing for the wrong metric. They’re confusing activity with progress. They’re protecting what they have instead of building what they need.
I started seeing the same patterns in how people practiced magic.
The magician who spent three hours a night running through their entire repertoire, perfectly executing effects they’d already mastered, while spending maybe ten minutes on the new technique they were trying to learn? That was the corporate equivalent of a company spending ninety percent of its budget maintaining existing products and wondering why innovation was stalling.
The performer who refused to try new material until their current routine was “perfect”? That was the startup founder who wouldn’t launch until the product was flawless — and missed the market window entirely.
The magic student who practiced the same way every single day — same order, same duration, same intensity — and couldn’t understand why progress had stopped? That was the executive who confused a consistent schedule with a consistent strategy.
Once I saw these patterns, I couldn’t unsee them. And more importantly, I started to suspect that the solutions might transfer too. If the answer to corporate stagnation was almost always “change the system, not the effort level,” maybe the answer to practice plateaus was the same.
Process Optimization
This is where it gets really practical.
In consulting, we spend a lot of time on process optimization. Not just making processes faster, but questioning whether the process itself is the right one. There’s a famous line attributed to Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” I lived by that principle in my consulting work. And it completely changed how I approached practice.
Most magicians I observed had a practice process that went something like this: warm up with familiar material, work through their repertoire from easiest to hardest, spend the last portion of their session on new or difficult material, stop when they ran out of time or energy.
This seems logical. It seems like a natural progression. It seems like common sense.
But when I looked at it through a process optimization lens, it was insane.
You’re using your best energy — your freshest focus, your strongest concentration — on material you’ve already mastered. And you’re saving your worst energy — depleted willpower, wandering attention, physical fatigue — for the material that most needs your best effort. You’ve designed a process that systematically delivers your highest-quality resources to the tasks that need them least and your lowest-quality resources to the tasks that need them most.
No consultant would ever sign off on that kind of resource allocation in a business. But magicians were doing it every single practice session and wondering why the new technique wasn’t improving.
When I flipped my practice order — starting with the hardest, newest material while my energy was fresh, and saving the familiar repertoire for the end of the session when I was mentally tired — the effect was immediate and dramatic. Not because I was practicing more. Not because I’d found some secret technique. Just because I’d optimized the process.
Questioning Assumptions
The biggest gift consulting gave me was the habit of questioning assumptions. Not just other people’s assumptions — my own.
In every consulting engagement, there’s a moment where the client says something that everyone in the room accepts as obvious truth, and I have to be the person who says, “Wait. Why do we believe that? What’s the evidence? What if that’s wrong?”
I started doing the same thing with magic practice orthodoxy.
Everyone said you should master the basics before moving on to advanced material. I questioned it. What if moving on to advanced material actually helps you master the basics faster, because the advanced work exercises the basic skills under higher pressure?
Everyone said repetition is the key to improvement. I questioned it. What if repetition without progressive challenge is actually the key to stagnation?
Everyone said you should practice until you get it right. I questioned that too. What if you should practice until you can’t get it wrong — and those are two very different standards?
Each of these questions led me to experiment. And each experiment produced data. And the data, more often than not, contradicted the conventional wisdom.
This is exactly how good consulting works. You don’t accept the client’s narrative about their own business. You build your own understanding through observation, data, and systematic testing. Then you compare your findings to their narrative and figure out where the gaps are. The gaps are where the opportunities hide.
The Meta-Lesson
Here’s the thing that took me longest to understand, and it’s the thing I most want to communicate.
The skills that make you good at your day job — whatever that job is — are probably more transferable to learning magic (or any new skill) than you think. The specific knowledge doesn’t transfer. Knowing how to analyze market segments doesn’t help you learn a card technique. But the thinking habits transfer completely.
If you’re an engineer, you know how to troubleshoot systems. Apply that to your practice.
If you’re a teacher, you know how to break complex skills into learnable steps. Apply that to your own learning.
If you’re a project manager, you know how to set milestones, track progress, and adjust timelines. Apply that to your skill development.
If you’re a scientist, you know how to form hypotheses and design experiments to test them. Apply that to every piece of practice advice you receive.
The adult learner’s advantage isn’t talent. It isn’t time. It isn’t even dedication. It’s the accumulated thinking toolkit from an entire career in another field. A toolkit that most people never think to unpack and apply to their new passion because they assume that learning magic (or music, or painting, or anything) requires some special, domain-specific learning ability that they either have or don’t have.
It doesn’t. It requires the same analytical thinking you already use every day. You just have to realize you already have it.
For me, consulting was the lens. Systems thinking showed me that practice is a system, and systems can be redesigned. Pattern recognition showed me that the patterns of stagnation in magic practice were the same patterns I’d seen in struggling companies. Process optimization showed me that the structure of practice matters more than the volume. And the habit of questioning assumptions showed me that most practice advice is based on tradition and intuition rather than evidence.
I didn’t learn these things from magic books. I learned them from ten years of telling CEOs that they were thinking about their problems wrong.
Then I sat in a hotel room with a deck of cards and realized I was thinking about my problems wrong too.
The difference was, I had the tools to fix it.
What I didn’t have yet — what was still months away from entering my life — was a framework that would organize all these scattered observations into a coherent methodology. A framework that would explain not just what the best practitioners did differently, but why. A framework that would transform my consulting-style pattern recognition into something systematic and teachable.
That framework was coming. And it would arrive through a partnership I never could have predicted — one that started with a keynote speech and a Skype call and ended with a magic company.
But that’s the next story.