There’s a bias in how we study excellence. We look at the people who made it and try to reverse-engineer their success. We read biographies of billionaires, study the habits of Olympic athletes, watch masterclasses by virtuosos. The assumption is straightforward: find out what the winners do, do the same thing, get similar results.
I spent months doing exactly this with magicians. Watching the best performers. Asking questions. Taking notes on their techniques, their practice habits, their approaches to learning. And as I’ve written about in earlier posts, those notes were largely useless — not because the performers were hiding anything, but because they couldn’t articulate the unconscious processes that made them exceptional.
The shift came when I started taking notes on the other group. The ones who weren’t making it. The ones who practiced for years without meaningful improvement. The ones whose shows were technically competent but somehow lifeless. The ones who, like me, were putting in the hours without getting the results.
That’s when the real patterns emerged.
The Obvious Question Nobody Asks
In my consulting work, we had a methodology for diagnosing organizational problems. You don’t just study the high-performing divisions — you compare them to the underperforming ones. The insights live in the gap. What does Division A do that Division B doesn’t? What does Division B do that Division A avoids? The comparison reveals what the individual analysis cannot.
It seems obvious. But in the performance world, almost nobody does this systematically. There are shelves full of books about what great magicians do. There’s almost nothing about what struggling magicians do differently. The implicit assumption is that failure is simply the absence of the things that create success — that if you just add the winning ingredients, the losing recipe transforms automatically.
That assumption is wrong. Failure has its own distinct patterns. And those patterns are often more instructive than the patterns of success, because failure patterns are visible, consistent, and — critically — shared by almost everyone who struggles.
The “Art of Practice” author described arriving at this same realization. After the frustration of interviewing naturals and getting nothing useful, he expanded his observation to include what he called non-naturals — people who achieved “mediocre or no success at all.” He started documenting how they naturally approached practice, looking for the specific ways their approach differed from what the naturals did instinctively.
This comparative method was the breakthrough. Not studying success. Not studying failure. Studying the gap between them.
My Notebook of Failure
I started carrying a small notebook — a habit from consulting that I’d never fully applied to magic. But instead of writing down what the best performers did, I started writing down what the rest of us did. Including myself.
The first entry was about my own practice session. I documented everything: what I did first, how long I spent on each technique, when I took breaks, what I worked on after the breaks, when I stopped, and how I felt about the session overall. Just raw behavioral data.
Then I started watching other learners. At conventions, at magic shops, in online forums where people shared their practice routines. I wasn’t looking for what made them great — I was looking for what made them stuck. And I wrote it all down.
Within a few weeks, the patterns were unmistakable.
Pattern One: The Comfort Ritual
Almost every struggling practitioner — myself absolutely included — started each practice session with comfortable material. A warm-up routine that felt good. Techniques we’d already mastered, performed at a pace that was easy and reassuring.
I watched one guy at a convention practice room spend forty-five minutes on a card flourish he’d clearly been doing for years. It was smooth, it was clean, it was impressive. And it was doing absolutely nothing for his development. When he finally moved to something new, his energy was depleted and his concentration was shot.
My notes said: “Started with best material. Spent majority of session on things already mastered. New material attempted only at the end, with depleted focus.”
I went back to my own practice journal and found the exact same pattern in my own sessions. The exact same one. I was doing the thing I was documenting as a failure pattern.
Pattern Two: The Time Trap
The second pattern was how people measured their practice. Without exception, every struggling practitioner I observed measured success by time spent. “I practiced for three hours today.” “I’ve been putting in two hours every evening.” The quantity of time was the metric, and more time was always considered better.
Nobody — not one person — measured their practice by results achieved. Nobody said, “I got technique X from seventy percent to eighty-five percent today.” It was always about the clock.
I recognized this immediately from consulting. We called it the “hours trap.” Junior consultants would proudly announce they’d worked until midnight, as if the time itself was the achievement. Senior consultants knew better: the question wasn’t how long you worked, but what you produced. A partner once told me, “I don’t care if you solve the problem in twenty minutes or twenty hours. I care that you solved the problem.”
In practice, the time trap was even more insidious. Because three hours of unfocused practice didn’t just fail to produce results — it actively reinforced bad habits. Every imprecise repetition during those depleted final hours was training the hands to do the wrong thing. The practitioners were literally getting worse by practicing longer.
Pattern Three: The Mastery Myth
The third pattern was the most counterintuitive: struggling practitioners refused to move to harder material until they’d “mastered” what they were currently working on. One hundred percent consistency. Perfect every time. Only then would they consider advancing.
This seemed like the responsible approach. Don’t build on a shaky foundation. Master the basics before attempting the advanced. It’s what every teacher says. It’s what every instruction book recommends.
But the naturals — the ones I’d been watching succeed — didn’t do this. They moved on at roughly ninety percent. Sometimes less. They left techniques imperfect and jumped to harder material, and somehow the imperfect techniques improved in their absence.
The struggling practitioners, by contrast, would grind the same technique for weeks, chasing that last ten percent of consistency. And the more they ground, the less they improved. The technique was at ninety percent and it stayed at ninety percent despite hours and hours of additional work.
My notes on this pattern were the most heavily annotated, because it directly contradicted everything I believed about learning. How could abandoning a skill before mastery lead to improvement? It made no logical sense. But the observational data was unambiguous.
Pattern Four: The Silence About Mistakes
The fourth pattern was emotional rather than behavioral. Struggling practitioners had a specific relationship with mistakes that was fundamentally different from what I observed in naturals.
When a struggling practitioner made an error during practice, the response was frustration. A grimace, a muttered curse, a faster retry. The mistake was treated as a failure to be eliminated, and the emotional response was negative.
When a natural made an error, the response was curiosity. A pause, a thoughtful look, sometimes a deliberate repetition of the mistake to understand what happened. The mistake was treated as information to be processed, and the emotional response was neutral or even interested.
This difference was subtle but pervasive. It colored every moment of every practice session. The struggling practitioners were at war with their mistakes. The naturals were in conversation with theirs.
The Mirror Effect
The hardest part of this research was recognizing myself in the failure patterns. Every single one.
I started with comfortable material. I measured by time. I refused to advance before mastery. I treated mistakes as enemies. I was a textbook case of every pattern I was documenting.
There’s a specific kind of discomfort that comes from realizing you’re not just studying a problem — you are the problem. That the notebook of failure is also an autobiography.
In consulting, we had a term for this: the client often is the problem they’re asking you to solve. The organizational dysfunction they’re hiring you to fix is frequently a reflection of the leadership team’s own blind spots. Showing them this mirror was the most delicate part of any engagement.
Showing myself the mirror was worse. There was no diplomatic consultant-speak to soften the message. The data said: you are doing everything the failing performers do. You are following the exact same patterns. If you continue, you will get the exact same results.
Why Failure Patterns Are More Useful Than Success Patterns
Here’s the thing about studying failure that I didn’t expect: failure patterns are more actionable than success patterns.
When you study what successful performers do, you get a list of positive behaviors to adopt. Start with hard material. Practice in bursts. Move on at ninety percent. These are useful, but they’re also abstract. How hard? How long are the bursts? Ninety percent of what?
When you study what failing performers do, you get a list of specific behaviors to stop. Stop starting with comfortable material. Stop measuring by time. Stop grinding past ninety percent. Stop treating mistakes as enemies.
Stopping is easier than starting. Removing is easier than adding. Identifying what to eliminate is more immediately actionable than identifying what to create. This is why diets that focus on removing specific foods often work better than diets that focus on adding specific foods. Subtraction is a more powerful change mechanism than addition.
This matched my own findings. The most impactful changes weren’t adding new behaviors — they were eliminating old ones. The naturals weren’t doing more than the non-naturals. In many ways, they were doing less. They just weren’t doing the counterproductive things that everyone else did.
The Universal Discovery
The most striking finding from my notebook was how universal the failure patterns were. They weren’t specific to magic. They weren’t specific to card handling or mentalism or stage performance. The same patterns appeared in every discipline I studied — musicians, athletes, dancers, acrobats. The mistakes, and the solutions to those mistakes, were truly universal.
This universality was what finally convinced me that the patterns were real and not artifacts of my limited observation. If the same failure modes appear across every discipline that requires practice, they’re not quirks of individual fields — they’re features of how human beings learn. Or more precisely, features of how human beings fail to learn.
The universality also meant that solutions from one field could inform another. If a guitarist’s insight about practicing beyond his current speed produced results, the same principle might apply to a card technique. If a figure skater’s approach to practicing failed jumps showed accelerated improvement, the same approach might work for failed sleights.
What I Did With the Notebook
The notebook of failure became my most valuable possession. More valuable than any trick I owned, any DVD I’d purchased, any convention I’d attended.
Because it gave me a map. Not a map of where to go — the naturals provided that. A map of where not to go. A detailed, documented, evidence-based inventory of the specific behaviors that guaranteed stagnation.
I went through my own practice sessions with the notebook open and identified every failure pattern I was exhibiting. Then I started eliminating them, one at a time. Not by adding new behaviors — by removing old ones. Stop starting with the warm-up ritual. Stop watching the clock. Stop grinding past ninety percent. Stop getting angry at mistakes.
Each elimination was uncomfortable. Each one felt like removing a piece of the foundation. But the foundation I was removing was the foundation of failure. And the discomfort of removing it was nothing compared to the frustration of building on it for another six months.
The notebook is still in my desk drawer. I don’t consult it anymore — the patterns are burned into my awareness now. But I keep it as a reminder that the most important research I ever did wasn’t studying what the best performers got right. It was studying what the rest of us got wrong.
And it started with the willingness to put myself in the second category.