This is the post where I state the obvious — except it isn’t obvious at all, because almost everyone gets it wrong.
Save the hard stuff for when you’re ready. Build up to it. Ease into the session. Get your confidence flowing, get your rhythm established, get comfortable — then push your limits.
I followed this advice for months. It felt right. It felt professional. It felt like what a responsible adult learner should do.
It was wrong. Completely, measurably, documentably wrong. And the reason it’s wrong is so simple that I’m still slightly angry nobody told me sooner: by the time you get to the hard stuff, you’ve already spent the cognitive resources you need to make the hard stuff productive.
The Reverse Session
I’ve written about deep end practice and the energy investment model in the last two posts. This post is the practical bridge between theory and execution — the specific, tactical change that had the most immediate impact on my progress.
The change: reverse the order of your practice session.
Old order: easy material first, hard material last. New order: hard material first, easy material last.
That’s it. Same material. Same total time. Different sequence. The results were not subtle.
In the first week of reversed sessions, I made more progress on two specific techniques than I had in the previous month. The techniques hadn’t changed. My hands hadn’t changed. What changed was that these techniques were finally receiving my sharpest focus instead of my most depleted attention.
The Hotel Room Experiment
I ran a deliberately controlled experiment on myself during a two-week stretch of consulting travel. Same hotel, same schedule, same amount of sleep, same practice time allocated each evening.
Week one: old order. Warm up with comfortable material, gradually increase difficulty, attempt the hardest technique at the end.
Week two: new order. Brief physical warm-up, immediately attempt the hardest technique, work downward through difficulty.
I tracked my success rate on the hardest technique each day. A simple metric: out of twenty attempts, how many were successful?
Week one results: Monday 4/20, Tuesday 5/20, Wednesday 4/20, Thursday 6/20, Friday 5/20. Average: 24%.
Week two results: Monday 7/20, Tuesday 8/20, Wednesday 9/20, Thursday 10/20, Friday 11/20. Average: 45%.
Same technique. Same practitioner. Same number of attempts. Nearly double the success rate, just from changing when in the session the attempts occurred.
I stared at those numbers in my practice journal and felt two things simultaneously: excitement that the approach worked, and frustration that I’d wasted months doing it the wrong way.
Why “Ready” Never Comes
The conventional approach assumes there’s a state of readiness that the warm-up creates. Get the hands moving, get the brain engaged, get into the zone — then you’ll be ready for the hard material.
But “ready” is a moving target. The warm-up doesn’t just engage your focus — it also depletes it. Every minute of the warm-up is a minute of cognitive expenditure. By the time you feel subjectively ready, you’ve already spent a significant portion of your focus budget.
The feeling of readiness is deceptive. It’s not an accumulation of resources — it’s an accumulation of confidence. You feel ready because you’ve been performing competently, and competent performance feels good. But feeling confident is not the same as having peak cognitive resources available.
Think of it like a phone battery. The warm-up doesn’t charge your battery. Your battery started at one hundred percent. The warm-up discharged it to seventy percent while making you feel like you’re at one hundred because the easy tasks it powered didn’t visibly drain anything.
The Objection I Kept Making
“But I need to warm up physically. My hands are stiff. The fine motor skills require physical preparation.”
This is true. And it’s also a smokescreen that obscures the real issue.
Physical warm-up takes two to three minutes. Flex your fingers. Stretch your wrists. Get the blood flowing. This is legitimate and necessary, especially for repetitive fine motor work like card handling.
But the warm-up most practitioners do isn’t two to three minutes of stretching. It’s twenty to forty-five minutes of comfortable practice disguised as physical preparation. The first few minutes are physical warm-up. The next thirty minutes are psychological warm-up — the pursuit of confidence and comfort that serves the ego, not the body.
Strip away the psychological warm-up and you’re left with a brief physical preparation followed by immediate engagement with the hardest material. This is what the naturals do. This is what produces results.
The Cascading Benefit
When you put the hard stuff first, something unexpected happens to the easy stuff that follows.
After twenty to thirty minutes of struggling with a technique that’s beyond my current ability, I transition to moderately challenging material. The contrast is striking — material that usually feels moderately difficult now feels almost manageable. My hands have been engaged at maximum difficulty, and dropping to ninety percent of that difficulty feels like a relief rather than a challenge.
The same effect cascades further down. Routine material at the end of the session feels effortless after the struggle at the beginning. Not because the material is easier — it’s the same material as always — but because the context has shifted. My calibration has been reset by the harder work.
This cascading benefit is one of the hidden advantages of hard-stuff-first practice that the conventional approach completely misses. Not only does the hard material get better practice — the easy material gets better practice too, because it benefits from the elevated baseline created by the preceding struggle.
What Ralphie May Knew
Even in stand-up comedy — about as far from card magic as you can get — the same principle applies. I came across Ralphie May’s standup masterclass where he describes a points system designed to force comedians to put new, untested material at the front of their performances. Five points for a new joke, two for a tag, one for rearranging material.
The system exists because comedians, like magicians, like musicians, like everyone, default to performing their strongest material and leaving the new, risky stuff for the end — where it gets the least attention, the least energy, and the least chance of developing.
May was solving the same problem from a different angle, but the underlying principle was identical: the hard, new, failure-prone work goes first, when your resources are freshest and the stakes for development are highest.
Making It Stick
The hardest part of this change wasn’t understanding it. It was doing it consistently.
Every session, the old instinct whispered: just do a quick run-through first. Just play through the routine once to get warmed up. Just check that everything still works before diving into the new stuff.
“Just” is the enemy of deep end practice. “Just a quick warm-up” becomes twenty minutes of comfortable practice. “Just check the routine” becomes a full run-through that depletes a third of your focus budget.
I dealt with the “just” problem by creating a physical trigger. When I sat down to practice, the first thing I picked up was not the deck of cards I was comfortable with. It was the specific prop or technique associated with the hardest thing I was working on. Sometimes that meant a different deck, specifically designated for the difficult technique. Sometimes it meant a coin, or a rope, or whatever tool the challenging skill required.
The physical act of reaching for the hard-material prop first, before touching anything comfortable, became the habit that overrode the instinct. My hands learned to reach for difficulty before my mind could talk them out of it.
It’s a small thing. But practice is made of small things, and the small structural decisions compound into enormous differences over time.
Save the hard stuff for the end, and you’ll be average forever. Put it first, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the hard stuff stops being hard.