There’s a line from “Art of Practice” that hit me like a slap: “If you do what everybody else does, you will get what everybody else gets.”
I read that sentence three times. Not because it was complicated — it’s almost absurdly simple. But because it described, with brutal accuracy, the first eighteen months of my magic practice.
I had been doing what everyone else does. And I had been getting what everyone else gets: slow, grinding progress that felt like walking through mud. Occasional breakthroughs followed by long plateaus. The nagging sense that I was working hard enough but somehow not smart enough.
The problem wasn’t my effort. The problem was that my effort was aimed in the same direction as everyone else’s. And in practice methodology, as in business strategy, the crowd is almost never heading toward excellence.
The Herd Instinct in Practice
In consulting, there’s a concept we used to call “best practice benchmarking.” Companies come to us and say, “Tell us what the best companies in our industry are doing so we can do the same thing.” On the surface, this sounds perfectly rational. Study the leaders, copy their approach, achieve similar results.
But here’s the dirty secret of best practice benchmarking: by the time a practice becomes widely known as a “best practice,” it’s already table stakes. Everyone is doing it. It’s no longer a differentiator — it’s a minimum requirement. The companies that are actually winning are doing something different, something that hasn’t been codified into a best practice yet, something that might even look wrong to the benchmarkers.
I saw the exact same dynamic in magic practice.
The “best practices” of magic practice were well established: warm up thoroughly before tackling hard material. Practice for at least an hour per session. Master each technique before moving to the next one. Repetition is the mother of skill. Practice makes perfect.
Everyone followed these principles. The forums reinforced them. The instructional videos assumed them. The community collectively agreed: this is how you get good.
And the community was collectively stuck.
Not everybody, of course. There were standouts — people whose skills seemed to improve at a different rate than everyone else’s. But when you asked those standouts what they did differently, they couldn’t articulate it. They just shrugged and said things like “I don’t know, I just practice.” Which, as I was learning from “Art of Practice,” was exactly the response you’d expect from a natural.
The Comfort of the Crowd
There’s a psychological safety in doing what everyone else does. If your approach matches the majority’s and you don’t improve, you can always blame external factors — not enough time, not enough talent, bad genetics, late start. The approach itself is never questioned because everyone uses it.
In consulting, I’d watched this play out at the organizational level. Companies that followed industry-standard approaches and got industry-standard results — meaning, mediocre — could always point to the strategy and say, “We did everything by the book.” The book was wrong, but nobody questioned the book because everyone was reading the same one.
Magic practice had its own book, and everyone was reading it.
The standard script went like this: You sit down. You warm up with something comfortable — a few shuffles, a couple of moves you’ve already mastered. This feels good. You’re easing in. Then you gradually work toward harder material. By the time you get to the newest, most challenging technique, you’ve been at it for forty-five minutes and your focus is fading. You grind through another thirty minutes on the hard stuff, making marginal progress. You finish feeling like you put in the work.
Sound familiar? It should. Because that’s what virtually every magic practitioner I knew was doing. And it’s what “Art of Practice” identified as the exact opposite of how naturals practice.
The Invisible Trap
The most insidious thing about following the crowd is that the approach isn’t obviously wrong. It’s reasonable. It makes logical sense. Warm up before you work hard — of course. Build from simple to complex — obviously. Practice until you’ve mastered each step — naturally.
Every piece of that logic is intuitive. And that’s precisely why it fails.
“Art of Practice” made a point that stuck with me: the counterintuitive twenty percent — the part that actually drives exceptional progress — feels wrong. It contradicts common sense. It runs against your instincts. And because it feels wrong, virtually nobody does it voluntarily.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. People practice the intuitive way. They get average results. They assume average results are normal. They never question the approach because everyone around them is getting the same results using the same approach. The approach becomes orthodoxy not because it works exceptionally well, but because it’s universally adopted.
In consulting, we called this “the tyranny of consensus.” When everyone agrees on an approach, it takes enormous intellectual courage to suggest the opposite. And yet the opposite is often exactly where the breakthrough lives.
My Own Herd Membership
Let me be honest about my own complicity in this.
When I started practicing card magic, I didn’t randomly arrive at my practice approach. I absorbed it from the environment. I watched tutorial videos that started with basic moves and built up. I read forum posts where experienced practitioners described their sessions — warm-up, fundamentals, new material, polish. I asked people whose skills I admired what their practice looked like, and they described — or thought they described — this gradual, systematic build-up.
I was a diligent student of the conventional approach. And I followed it religiously.
For about eighteen months, my progress was exactly what you’d predict: slow, steady in the beginning, then stalling. I could feel myself hitting a ceiling. My fundamentals were solid enough, but the more advanced techniques I wanted to learn seemed perpetually just out of reach. I’d make a little progress, then plateau. Make a little more, plateau again.
I blamed myself. Not enough dedication. Not enough repetitions. Maybe I started too late. Maybe my hands weren’t built for this.
It never occurred to me to blame the approach. Because the approach was what everyone used. How could everyone be wrong?
The First Deviation
The shift started after I began reading “Art of Practice” and observing performers who were clearly operating at a different level.
The first thing I changed was my session order. Instead of warming up with comfortable material and gradually working toward the hard stuff, I flipped it. Hard stuff first. Newest technique first. The thing I couldn’t do yet — that went to the front of the line.
This felt deeply wrong. It felt like starting a marathon at sprint pace. My instincts screamed that I was going to hurt myself, metaphorically speaking. Every fiber of conventional wisdom told me this was reckless.
But I’d read enough of “Art of Practice” by then to understand why it made sense. My best cognitive resources — the sharpest focus, the strongest willpower, the freshest attention — were available at the beginning of each session. By using them on comfortable material, I was spending my most valuable currency on things that didn’t need it. It was like assigning your best consultant to a project that’s already running smoothly while the troubled project gets the intern.
The first few sessions were uncomfortable. Starting cold with the hardest technique felt like jumping into a frozen lake. No gentle on-ramp. No psychological warm-up of succeeding at something first. Just immediate confrontation with my inadequacy.
But within two weeks, I noticed something I hadn’t experienced in months: genuine, visible progress on the techniques I’d been stuck on. Not because I was practicing them more. Because I was practicing them better — with my best energy instead of my leftover energy.
What Happens When You Leave the Herd
When I started practicing differently from everyone around me, something interesting happened: people told me I was doing it wrong.
A fellow magic enthusiast watched me start a practice session by going straight to a technique I was struggling with — no warm-up, no easing in — and said, “You’re going to build bad habits that way. You need to warm up first.”
I understood his concern. It was the same concern I would have had six months earlier. It was the concern of someone who was following the herd and couldn’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily leave it.
In consulting, I’d seen the same reaction when I recommended strategies that went against industry convention. Clients would look at me like I’d suggested setting their factory on fire. “But everyone does it the other way,” they’d say. As if consensus were proof of correctness.
The truth — in both consulting and practice — is that consensus is often proof of mediocrity. Not because the majority is stupid, but because the majority’s approach is, by definition, the average approach. And average approaches produce average results.
The Deeper Lesson
“Art of Practice” didn’t just tell me to do things differently. It explained why the conventional approach persists despite its limitations.
Humans are social animals. We look to others for cues on how to behave. In uncertain environments — and learning a new skill is inherently uncertain — we default to copying what others do. It’s a survival mechanism. If the group is doing something a certain way, there’s probably a reason. Following the group is usually safer than striking out on your own.
This instinct serves us well in most contexts. But in practice methodology, it creates a trap. The group’s approach isn’t based on what produces the best results. It’s based on what feels logical, what tradition dictates, and what the previous generation passed down. These are terrible criteria for effectiveness.
The book quoted a line that I wrote in my notebook: “If the herd is doing the intuitive to their own disadvantage, and if you know how to do the counterintuitive to their own advantage, there is often a huge gain to be made.”
That “huge gain” is the gap between average and exceptional. And it exists precisely because most people won’t cross it. Not because they can’t — because it feels wrong. Because the crowd is heading the other direction. Because doing the counterintuitive thing means standing alone and trusting a process that contradicts everything you think you know.
The Consulting Parallel That Made It Click
I remember a project where we were advising a retail client whose stores were underperforming. Their competitors were all investing in bigger stores, wider product ranges, more square footage. The intuitive move was to follow suit — bigger, broader, more.
Our analysis showed the opposite: the client should go smaller. Focused stores. Curated selection. Less square footage, higher revenue per square meter. It went against every trend in the industry.
The client’s CEO looked at our recommendation and said, “But all our competitors are going bigger.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why there’s an opportunity in going smaller. The gap exists because nobody is filling it.”
They implemented it. Within two years, their per-store profitability was double the industry average. Not because “small” was inherently better than “big,” but because “different” created space that “same” never could.
Practice works the same way. The gap between average and exceptional isn’t filled by doing the same things as average practitioners but trying harder. It’s filled by doing different things entirely. Things that the average practitioner would look at and say, “That’s wrong.”
The counterintuitive path. The one that feels like a mistake. The one the herd isn’t taking.
That, I was learning, is where all the progress lives. And the reason so few people find it is precisely because they’re looking where everyone else is looking.
The question was never whether a better approach existed. The question was whether I could commit to it when every social signal told me to fall back in line.