There’s a cognitive bias that I believe sabotages more practice sessions than lack of talent, lack of time, and lack of discipline combined. It operates below the level of conscious awareness. It disguises itself as responsible, mature behavior. And it almost certainly affects you right now, in exactly the way it affected me for years.
The bias is this: humans are roughly twice as motivated to avoid losing something they already have as they are to gain something new. Psychologists call it loss aversion. In the context of practice and skill development, it creates what the “Art of Practice” describes as the towards-and-away-from bias — and understanding it changed how I structure every session.
Here’s how it works. When you’re a beginner, you have nothing to lose. Every technique is new. Every session is about forward movement. You’re climbing from zero, so there’s no downside risk. All you can do is gain. The motivational equation is simple: practice equals progress equals excitement.
But the moment you’ve built something — the moment you have real skills, techniques you can execute reliably, material you’re proud of — the equation changes. Now there’s something to protect. Now every practice session carries two opposing forces: the desire to gain new abilities and the fear of losing existing ones.
And the fear is twice as strong as the desire.
The Day I Caught Myself
I’d been working on magic seriously for about two years when I noticed something odd about my practice sessions. I was practicing regularly — five or six nights a week in whatever hotel room I happened to be in. I was putting in focused time. I was following the principles I’d learned about adaptation and sweet-spot difficulty. By all external measures, I was doing everything right.
But my skill set wasn’t expanding. I was getting marginally better at the things I already knew, while my repertoire of techniques remained essentially static. No new material was getting past the early learning stage. Nothing was breaking through from “working on it” to “can perform it.”
So one evening in a hotel in Zurich, I did something I should have done months earlier. I actually timed how I allocated my practice session. Not the total duration — I’d already learned that lesson — but the breakdown. How many minutes on which material.
The results were damning.
Out of a roughly fifty-minute session, I’d spent thirty-eight minutes on techniques I could already perform at eighty percent or above. Material I’d mastered. Routines that were essentially performance-ready. I was polishing things that were already polished.
The remaining twelve minutes — barely a quarter of the session — went to new material. The stuff that was actually at the edge of my ability. The techniques in the sweet spot where adaptation happens.
I tracked this over the next two weeks. The ratio was consistent: roughly seventy-five to eighty percent of every session was devoted to maintaining existing skills, and twenty to twenty-five percent to developing new ones. I was running a preservation operation disguised as a growth operation.
Why the Bias Feels Rational
The insidious part of this bias is that it feels completely rational. If you asked me at the time why I was spending so much time on mastered material, I’d have given you perfectly logical answers.
“I need to stay sharp.” Of course you do. Skills degrade without practice. If you stop rehearsing your best material, it’ll get sloppy. This is true — but it doesn’t require seventy-five percent of your practice time. Maintenance of an established skill requires a fraction of the time that building it did. A five-minute run-through keeps a mastered technique sharp. Thirty minutes of meticulous rehearsal on that same technique is not maintenance. It’s avoidance.
“I have a show coming up.” This was my favorite justification. When you have performances scheduled, it feels irresponsible to spend practice time on techniques you can’t yet perform. Better to refine what you’ve got. Better to make sure the existing material is bulletproof. This logic sounds unassailable until you realize that “I have a show coming up” is true fifty-two weeks a year when you run a magic company. It’s a permanent excuse to never push forward.
“The basics are the foundation.” Another classic. You can’t build advanced skills on a shaky foundation, so it makes sense to continually reinforce the fundamentals. But at what point does reinforcing the foundation become hiding in the foundation? The fundamentals were solid two months ago. They’re solid now. Running through them for the hundredth time isn’t strengthening the foundation — it’s digging in.
Every one of these justifications has a kernel of truth. That’s what makes the bias so effective. It doesn’t need to lie to you. It just needs to exaggerate the risk of loss until the risk of stagnation becomes invisible.
The Asymmetry at Work
The towards-and-away-from bias creates a specific, measurable asymmetry in how you evaluate your practice priorities.
When you think about gaining a new skill, you think in terms of potential. “If I learn this technique, I could add it to my show. It would be interesting. It might make things better.” The emotional valence is mildly positive. It’s attractive but not urgent.
When you think about losing an existing skill, you think in terms of threat. “If I don’t rehearse this, I might mess it up in performance. I could look foolish. I could lose something I worked hard to build.” The emotional valence is significantly negative. It’s alarming. It demands immediate action.
The gain is hypothetical and future-tense. The loss is vivid and present-tense. And because the fear of loss is roughly twice as motivating as the anticipation of gain, the fear wins almost every time. Not because you’re making a conscious decision to play it safe, but because the bias has already weighted the options before your conscious mind even considers them.
This is exactly the mechanism that makes experienced practitioners plateau. Beginners don’t plateau because they have nothing to protect. Advanced practitioners plateau because they have so much to protect that protection consumes all available practice resources. The better you get, the stronger the bias pulls you toward preservation.
The Consulting Mirror
Once I understood this bias, I started seeing it everywhere — including in my consulting work.
I’d watched companies do exactly this for years. A firm builds a successful product line. It dominates the market. Then it gradually shifts resources from innovation to defending the existing products. R&D budgets shrink. Marketing dollars flow to established brands instead of new ones. The organizational mindset shifts from “what can we build?” to “what might we lose?”
It’s the same bias operating at institutional scale. The towards-and-away-from asymmetry doesn’t just affect individuals with decks of cards in hotel rooms. It affects every system that has something to protect.
In consulting, I’d have told a client in this position: you need to allocate a fixed percentage of resources to growth initiatives, regardless of how much you want to protect existing revenue. The growth allocation needs to be protected from the preservation instinct, because the preservation instinct will always try to absorb it.
I’d given that advice a dozen times to boards and CEOs. And then I’d gone back to my hotel room and done exactly what I’d told them not to do.
Rebalancing the Ratio
Awareness was the first step, but awareness alone doesn’t fix a cognitive bias. The bias is hardwired. You can’t think it away. You can only build structures that counteract it.
My solution was blunt and mechanical: I imposed a fixed allocation rule on every practice session. Minimum forty percent of session time must be spent on new material in the sweet spot. Maximum sixty percent on maintenance and refinement of existing skills.
Forty-sixty. Not negotiable. Not subject to how I felt that day, not adjustable based on upcoming shows, not flexible based on whether the new material was frustrating me. The ratio was the ratio. Period.
This felt wrong at first. Deeply wrong. Spending only sixty percent of a session on material I knew meant those techniques would get less rehearsal. The bias screamed at me that my existing skills would degrade. That my show would suffer. That I was being reckless.
None of that happened. My existing skills didn’t degrade because sixty percent of a session is more than enough to maintain established techniques. What did happen was that new material started progressing. Techniques that had been stuck in the “working on it” phase for months began moving toward performance-readiness. My repertoire started expanding for the first time in over a year.
The bias had been lying to me. It told me that eighty percent was the minimum required for maintenance. The truth was closer to forty percent. All that extra time — that additional thirty-five to forty percent of every session — had been burned on an illusion of necessity. Protection that wasn’t needed. Insurance against a loss that wasn’t going to happen.
The Priority Inversion
Once I saw the pattern, I gave it a name: the priority inversion. It describes the moment when preservation silently becomes your primary goal, displacing progress without any conscious decision.
The inversion happens gradually. In month one, your priority split is ninety-ten in favor of growth. Everything is new. There’s nothing to maintain. Month six, it’s seventy-thirty. You’ve built some skills worth protecting, and you allocate time accordingly. Month twelve, it’s fifty-fifty. Month eighteen, it’s thirty-seventy. By month twenty-four, you’re spending eighty percent of your time protecting what you have and wondering why you’re not getting better.
No single session triggers the inversion. No single allocation feels unreasonable. Each tiny shift toward preservation makes sense in isolation. But the cumulative effect is devastating. Over two years, you go from an aggressive learner to a defensive practitioner, and you never notice the change because it happened one percent at a time.
Catching the inversion requires periodic audits. I now do this every month: track the actual allocation of five consecutive sessions and calculate the growth-to-maintenance ratio. If growth drops below forty percent, I know the bias is winning, and I correct the allocation immediately. No justifications. No “but I have a show coming up.” Just correct it.
The Deeper Lesson
What strikes me most about the towards-and-away-from bias is not that it exists — all cognitive biases exist — but how thoroughly it disguises itself as wisdom.
The bias doesn’t present itself as fear. It presents itself as maturity. As professionalism. As knowing what matters. “A real performer takes care of their material.” “You need to respect what you’ve built.” “Don’t neglect your foundation.” These sound like the advice of an experienced mentor. They’re actually the rationalizations of a threat-detection system that can’t tell the difference between “I might lose a technique” and “a lion might eat me.”
The entire towards-and-away-from dynamic boils down to a simple question that you should ask yourself honestly: when I sit down to practice, am I excited about what I might gain, or am I anxious about what I might lose?
If the answer is anxious, the bias is running your sessions. And it’s been running them for longer than you think.
The good news is that awareness, combined with a structural solution — a fixed allocation ratio that you enforce mechanically regardless of how you feel — breaks the cycle. You don’t have to defeat the bias. You just have to stop letting it set the schedule.
Forty percent growth. Minimum. Non-negotiable.
It’s the simplest rule I’ve ever imposed on my practice. And it might be the one that made the most difference.