I spent about six months asking the wrong question.
The question was simple, direct, and seemed perfectly reasonable: “What do you do differently?” I asked it of every skilled magician I could get time with. At conventions, after shows, during hotel bar conversations at two in the morning. I was a consultant by training — gathering expert insight was what I did for a living. This should have been straightforward.
It was straightforward. And it was completely useless.
Not because the people I asked were unhelpful. They were generous with their time, patient with my questions, and genuinely tried to give me useful answers. The problem was that their answers — every single one of them — were wrong. Not deliberately wrong. Unconsciously wrong. They told me what they believed they did, which had almost no relationship to what they actually did.
“Art of Practice” gave me the framework to understand why. And understanding why changed everything about how I approached learning.
The Napoleon Hill Problem
The author of “Art of Practice” described his own version of exactly this frustration. Early in his journey, he’d done what seemed obvious: interview the best performers he could find, ask them what made them exceptional, and extract a system from their answers.
It was the Napoleon Hill approach. Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich” after spending years interviewing the most successful business leaders of his era — Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison. He asked them what they did differently, compiled their answers, and created a system for success.
The “Art of Practice” author tried the same thing with elite performers. He interviewed dozens of top practitioners across multiple disciplines. He asked them about their practice habits, their mindset, their approach to learning new skills.
The result? Nothing actionable. The answers were vague, contradictory, and ultimately unhelpful. “Love what you do.” “Work hard.” “Practice every day.” “Stay focused.” Platitudes wrapped in sincerity. The performers meant every word and none of it was useful.
This matched my experience precisely. The best card workers I talked to gave me answers that were earnest but empty. “I just practice a lot.” “I try to stay focused.” “I do whatever feels right.” These weren’t evasions. These were genuine attempts to articulate something they couldn’t see in themselves.
Why Experts Can’t Explain Expertise
There’s a concept in psychology called unconscious competence. It describes the final stage of skill acquisition, where the skill has become so automatic that the practitioner no longer needs to think about it — and, crucially, can no longer access the specific processes that make it work.
You’ve experienced this yourself. Think about tying your shoes. You do it automatically, without thought, perfectly every time. Now try to explain the exact sequence of movements to someone who’s never done it. Not just “you loop it and pull it through” — the actual biomechanics. Which finger goes where? What’s the precise angle of the pull? When does the left hand switch roles with the right?
You can’t articulate it. Not because you’re bad at explaining things, but because the skill has moved below the threshold of conscious awareness. It’s compiled into neural firmware. The detailed steps are no longer accessible to your conscious mind.
Elite performers have done this with their practice habits. The specific behaviors that make them exceptional — starting with hard material, stopping when focus fades, moving on before mastery — have become so automatic that they’re invisible to the practitioners themselves. When asked what they do differently, they can’t tell you, because they don’t consciously know.
This is why “love what you do” and “work hard” come up so often in expert interviews. Those are the parts of the process that are still conscious — the emotional and motivational layer. The structural and behavioral layer, where the real differences live, has sunk below awareness.
The Articulation Paradox
There’s a bitter irony in all of this: the people who can articulate their practice approach most clearly are usually the ones whose approach is wrong.
I experienced this firsthand. The average practitioners I talked to could give me detailed, systematic explanations of how they practiced. “First I warm up for fifteen minutes. Then I work through my fundamentals. Then I tackle new material. I always practice for at least ninety minutes. I don’t move on until each technique is mastered.”
These explanations were clear, logical, and comprehensive. They were also descriptions of the non-natural approach — the intuitive approach that feels right and produces average results.
The naturals? They shrugged. “I don’t know, I just do stuff.” “I mess around until something works.” “I practice whatever I feel like.” Their descriptions made them sound disorganized, random, even lazy. But their results were exceptional.
“Art of Practice” addressed this directly, and the explanation was elegant: when your practice approach is conscious and deliberate, it means you designed it rationally. And rational design, when applied to practice methodology, tends to produce the intuitive (and wrong) approach. You consciously design a warm-up phase because warming up seems logical. You consciously plan to build from easy to hard because that progression seems rational. You consciously decide to master each level before advancing because completion feels responsible.
When your approach is unconscious and instinctive, it means you never designed it at all. You just did what felt right in the moment, and your instincts happened to be calibrated correctly. You can’t explain it because there was never a conscious decision to explain.
My Six Months of Wrong Questions
Looking back, I can see exactly what happened during those six months of interviewing performers.
I asked them what they did. They told me what they thought they did. I took notes on what they told me. I tried to implement what they described. Their descriptions were wrong, so my implementation was wrong, so my results didn’t improve.
At no point in this process did anyone lie to me or withhold information. The failure wasn’t in the answers. It was in the question. “What do you do differently?” is the wrong question to ask an unconsciously competent performer, because the honest answer is “I don’t know” — and most people aren’t comfortable saying “I don’t know” when someone is asking for their expertise.
So instead they construct a narrative. They observe their own behavior through the lens of conventional wisdom and describe what they think they should be doing rather than what they actually do. They tell you about the warm-up they think they do, the systematic progression they think they follow, the disciplined two-hour sessions they think they complete. And you write it all down, implement it faithfully, and wonder why it doesn’t work.
In consulting, we had a term for this: stated versus revealed preferences. What people say they want and what their behavior reveals they actually want are often different things. The same gap exists between what experts say they do and what observation reveals they actually do.
The Day I Stopped Asking
I remember the specific conversation that made me stop interviewing performers.
I was talking with someone whose card skills I deeply admired. I’d been asking him detailed questions about his practice routine — how long, how structured, what order, what techniques. He’d been answering patiently, giving me what sounded like a thorough description of a systematic practice approach.
Then I watched him practice the next day. What he actually did bore almost no resemblance to what he’d described. He didn’t warm up the way he’d told me. He didn’t follow the sequence he’d outlined. He didn’t practice for the duration he’d stated. His actual behavior was completely different from his self-report.
He wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed his description was accurate. He’d never actually observed his own practice with the analytical eye he brought to his magic. The gap between his self-perception and his actual behavior was invisible to him.
That was the day I realized that watching was the only reliable research method. Not asking. Not interviewing. Not discussing. Watching. Silent, systematic observation of what people actually do rather than what they say they do.
The Consulting Parallel
This exact phenomenon was something I’d encountered repeatedly in my consulting career, and I should have recognized it sooner in the magic world.
When you ask a successful CEO what makes their company great, they’ll give you a story about vision, culture, and strategic decision-making. When you actually analyze the company’s operations, the real advantages are usually in mundane structural details that nobody talks about — how information flows between departments, how quickly they kill failing projects, how their hiring process accidentally selects for the right traits.
The CEO’s narrative isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just not where the real advantage lives. The narrative describes the conscious layer. The advantage lives in the unconscious layer — the embedded habits and structural patterns that nobody designed deliberately but that emerged from the instincts of the right people making the right micro-decisions over time.
In both business and magic, asking experts why they’re successful produces a conscious narrative about the unconscious reality. And conscious narratives about unconscious processes are, by definition, unreliable.
The Shift That Mattered
When I finally stopped asking and started watching, everything changed.
But watching effectively required a different skill set than interviewing. In an interview, you control the conversation. You ask specific questions and get specific answers. In observation, you have no control. You just watch and try to notice what’s different.
The first few weeks of pure observation, I noticed nothing remarkable. People practiced. Cards moved. Hands repeated movements. It all looked the same.
The breakthrough came when I stopped watching the cards and started watching the person. Not the technique but the behavior around the technique. When did they start? What did they start with? When did they pause? How long were the pauses? When did they stop? What was their emotional response to mistakes?
That’s where the patterns lived. Not in the visible technique but in the invisible decisions that surrounded it. And those patterns matched, with eerie precision, what “Art of Practice” had described through its own independent research.
The interviews had given me information about what experts think they do. The observation gave me information about what they actually do. And those were two very different data sets.
The lesson extended far beyond magic practice. In any domain where you’re trying to learn from the best, asking is the intuitive approach. And like most intuitive approaches to practice, it’s the wrong one.
Watch. Observe. Notice the things that don’t match the narrative. That’s where the real knowledge lives — in the gap between what people say and what they do, between the conscious story and the unconscious reality.
That gap is where I found everything that mattered.