The decision to watch instead of ask was easy. Knowing what to look for was not.
I’d come to terms with the fact that talented performers couldn’t explain their own excellence. The “Art of Practice” had given me a theoretical framework for why — unconscious competence, the naturals concept, the gap between what experts do and what they can articulate. But theory only gets you so far. I needed to apply it. I needed to watch real people practice and figure out what I was actually seeing.
For weeks, I watched and saw nothing revelatory. Just people practicing. Cards moving. Hands repeating. The problem was that I was watching technique — the visible output. Trying to see how their fingers moved differently from mine. Which was a bit like trying to understand a company’s strategy by staring at its products on a shelf. You can look all day and never understand what operational decisions shaped them.
I had to force myself to stop watching the cards and start watching the person.
That shift — from watching the technique to watching the practitioner — changed what I saw completely.
The Hard Stuff First
The first pattern I noticed consistently was about sequencing.
It showed up with a performer I’d met at a magic convention in Germany. He was phenomenally skilled — the kind of person whose card work made you want to quit. I’d asked if I could sit in on one of his practice sessions, and to my surprise, he said yes.
I expected him to start with a warm-up. Some basic handling, some comfortable material, then gradually work his way up. That’s what I did. That’s what seemed logical.
He didn’t do that.
He sat down, pulled out his cards, and went straight for the thing he was struggling with. Not a warm-up in sight. He spent the first twenty minutes on a sequence that wasn’t working yet, that failed more often than it succeeded. And he did this with complete focus — the kind of concentrated attention you can almost feel in the air.
The comfortable material, the stuff he’d already mastered? That came later. Almost as an afterthought. Like a cooldown jog after a hard run.
I noticed this once and thought it was a personal quirk. Then I noticed it again. And again. Different performers, different levels, different settings — but the pattern held. The ones who seemed to improve fastest started their sessions with their weakest material. They attacked the hard stuff when their minds were freshest.
Meanwhile, I’d been doing the opposite for months. Starting with what felt good, what I could already do. By the time I got to the hard stuff, I was mentally depleted. No wonder my progress on new material was glacial.
Short, Intense, Then Stop
The second pattern was about duration and rhythm.
In consulting, long hours were a badge of honor. That culture had infected my practice habits. I’d set two-hour blocks and grind through them start to finish. If I stopped early, I felt guilty.
The performers I watched didn’t work like that at all.
They practiced in bursts. Twenty minutes of intense focus, then cards down. Walk around. Check the phone. Five or ten minutes of nothing productive. Then back in with fresh intensity.
I remember watching one particularly skilled close-up performer at a hotel lobby during a convention. He was working on something new, his focus extraordinary. Then, maybe fifteen minutes in, he just stopped. Put the cards in his pocket. Sat back. Looked out the window.
I thought he was done.
Five minutes later, he pulled the cards back out and went at it again with the same intensity. Fresh. Like the previous session hadn’t happened.
This happened three or four times in an hour. When I added up the actual practice time, it was maybe forty minutes of focused work in a sixty-minute window. But the quality of those forty minutes was something I’d never achieved in my marathon two-hour sessions.
There was something else during the breaks. The performers weren’t just resting. You could see them thinking. Processing. Their hands would occasionally mime a movement without cards. They were still working — but internally, letting their brains consolidate what they’d just practiced.
Curiosity About Failure
The third pattern was the most striking, and probably the hardest for me to adopt.
When I made a mistake in practice — dropped a card, lost track of a sequence — my immediate response was frustration. A surge of annoyance. The mistake was an enemy to be conquered through repetitive force.
The skilled performers treated mistakes completely differently.
When something went wrong, they slowed down. Not emotionally — they didn’t get dejected. They slowed down mechanically. They repeated the failed action at half speed, watching their own hands like a curious scientist examining a specimen. What happened there? Why did that catch at that angle? Was the pressure different?
One performer I watched would narrate his failures out loud. “Okay, that slipped because my pinky was too high. Let me try it lower.” This wasn’t frustration talking. It was analytical interest. He was genuinely curious about why the failure occurred, as though the failure itself was the most interesting part of the session.
I realized that for these performers, mistakes weren’t interruptions to practice. Mistakes were practice. They were the signal pointing to exactly where growth was possible. Getting angry at a mistake was like getting angry at a compass for pointing north.
Constant Variation
The fourth pattern took me longest to recognize because it was so subtle.
The performers who improved fastest never seemed to practice the same way twice. Even when working on the same technique day after day, they’d change something. Different speed. Different hand position. Standing up, then sitting down. With a new deck, then a broken-in deck. In silence, then while talking. In front of a mirror, then without one.
It looked almost random from the outside. Like fidgeting rather than discipline.
But over time, I realized it wasn’t random at all. They were systematically exploring the boundaries of each technique. Testing what worked under different conditions. Building not just one way to execute a move, but a flexible competence that could survive unpredictable performance conditions.
My practice had been ritualistic in its consistency. Same chair, same deck, same mirror, every session. I’d been optimizing for one specific set of circumstances. No wonder my techniques crumbled the moment something changed.
The Consulting Connection
Here’s what made all this observation possible: my consulting background had trained me for exactly this kind of pattern recognition.
In strategy consulting, you learn early that what people tell you and what actually happens are two different datasets. Executives describe decision-making as rational and strategic. Then you sit in their meetings and watch decisions made by politics and gut feeling. The real strategy isn’t in the PowerPoint. It’s in the observed behavior.
I’d spent years developing the skill of watching operations — not what a company says it does, but what it actually does. Walking factory floors. Sitting in on sales calls. Building models from behavior, not from interviews.
Without realizing it, I’d been applying the same methodology to magic. Observing practice sessions instead of interviewing performers. Looking for patterns in behavior rather than in advice. Building a model of effective practice from what I saw, not from what anyone told me.
Finding the Validation
When I’d read “Art of Practice” and found the naturals concept, something remarkable happened: the patterns the book described matched almost exactly what I’d been independently observing.
Hard stuff first? The book described it as “Deep End Practice.” Short intense bursts? The book described it through an energy model — high-value, good-value, and low-value energy phases. Curiosity about failure? The book framed it as treating mistakes as data, not setbacks. Constant variation? The book described it as systematically challenging beyond the comfort zone.
I hadn’t invented anything. I’d independently stumbled onto patterns that researchers had been studying across multiple disciplines. Which was both humbling and encouraging. Humbling because I wasn’t as original as I thought. Encouraging because if researchers found the same patterns across athletes, musicians, and circus performers that I was finding in magic, then I was probably seeing something real.
The Gap Between Seeing and Doing
I want to be honest about something. Seeing these patterns didn’t mean I immediately adopted them.
There’s a massive gap between understanding what effective practice looks like and actually changing your own habits.
I knew I should start with hard material. But the pull of starting with something comfortable was strong. It felt good to begin with something I’d mastered. It was reassuring.
I knew I should take breaks. But stopping after twenty minutes felt like quitting. My consulting conditioning — long hours equal dedication — didn’t let go easily.
I knew I should be curious about mistakes. But frustration is an automatic emotional response. You can’t just decide to find failure interesting.
And I knew I should vary my conditions. But routine felt safe.
The watching was the easy part. The doing would take much longer. But at least now I had a map. Not a map anyone handed me — a map I’d built from observation, validated by research, and ready to be tested.
My own two hands, a deck of cards, and another long night in another hotel room.