Music was my first serious passion. Before cards, before magic, before any of the obsessions I write about in this blog, music was the thing I poured myself into.
I’m not a professional musician. Never was. But music mattered to me in the way that a discipline matters when you invest real time and emotional energy into it. I played, I listened, I studied, I cared about getting better. It was one of the reasons hotel life hit hard — you can’t exactly haul a full setup from city to city when you’re living out of a carry-on bag two hundred nights a year. That constraint is part of what pushed me toward cards in the first place. A deck fits in a pocket.
But my music background gave me an unexpected advantage when I started studying practice methodology. Because the research on how expert musicians practice versus how amateurs practice hit me on a level that the figure skating study couldn’t. I didn’t just understand the finding intellectually. I recognized myself in it.
The Research
The finding mirrors what we see in figure skating but applied to music: expert musicians spend significantly more practice time on passages they haven’t mastered, while amateur musicians spend significantly more time playing passages that already sound good.
I encountered this in the same “Art of Practice” material that introduced me to the figure skating research, and the parallel was immediately clear. Two completely different disciplines. Two completely different skill sets. The exact same behavioral split between those who reach expert level and those who don’t.
Expert musicians sit down and go straight to measure forty-seven, the one where the fingering falls apart. They isolate the transition between the bridge and the chorus that they can’t execute cleanly. They loop the four bars that sound terrible, over and over, until they sound less terrible.
Amateur musicians sit down and play the whole piece from the beginning. When they reach the part that sounds good — the verse they’ve nailed, the solo they’ve polished — they enjoy it. When they reach the part that sounds bad, they wince, push through it, and move on. Then they go back to the beginning and play through again, enjoying the good parts and wincing through the bad ones.
The expert’s practice sounds terrible most of the time. Because they’re spending most of their time on the parts that are terrible.
The amateur’s practice sounds pretty good most of the time. Because they’re spending most of their time on the parts that already work.
One of them is getting better. The other is getting more comfortable.
The Pleasure Trap
I call this the pleasure trap, and it’s even more insidious in music than in magic because music provides such immediate aesthetic feedback.
When you play a passage well on an instrument, it sounds good. Literally. The sound enters your ears and your brain processes it as pleasant. There’s a sensory reward that goes beyond the abstract satisfaction of competent execution. The music itself is the reward.
When you play a passage badly, it sounds bad. The dissonance, the timing errors, the buzzing strings or cracked notes — they’re genuinely unpleasant to hear. Your brain wants to stop hearing them.
So the pleasure trap in music practice works through your ears. Your brain learns, at a level below conscious decision-making, to steer you toward the passages that produce pleasant sounds and away from the passages that produce unpleasant ones. You don’t decide to spend more time on what sounds good. Your ears guide you there.
With card magic, the pleasure trap is more visual and kinesthetic. A sleight that’s smooth and clean feels satisfying in your hands and looks satisfying in the mirror. A sleight that’s rough and obvious feels awkward and looks worse. The same gravitational pull toward comfort, just through different senses.
But the trap is identical in both cases: the parts that feel good are the parts that don’t need more work. The parts that feel bad are exactly the parts that need all the work. And your brain is optimized to steer you in precisely the wrong direction.
My Music Practice, Honestly
Looking back at my music practice with the lens of this research, I can see the pattern so clearly it’s almost embarrassing.
I’d sit down to practice and start with the opening of whatever piece I was working on. The opening was usually the most polished section, because I’d played it first in every single practice session for weeks. It had received more repetitions than any other part of the piece, not because it needed them, but because it happened to come first.
By the time I reached the difficult sections — the bridge, the key change, the technically demanding passage in the middle — I was already twenty minutes in. My focus was decent but not fresh. And when the difficult section sounded bad, my instinct was to push through it and get to the next section that sounded good, rather than stopping, isolating, and working on the failure.
Sometimes I’d tell myself I’d “come back to it.” I rarely did. Or I’d rationalize that playing through the whole piece gave me a better sense of the musical arc, the flow. True enough, but irrelevant to the question of whether I was actually improving the weak sections.
The result was exactly what the research predicts: the good parts got better. The bad parts stayed bad. And the piece as a whole sounded like it had been assembled from different skill levels, because it had been practiced by different amounts of attention.
The Universal Pattern
Here’s what hit me when I put the figure skating research and the music research side by side: this isn’t a domain-specific finding. This is a human finding.
Two disciplines with almost nothing in common — one artistic and auditory, one athletic and kinesthetic. Different skills, different training environments, different cultures. And yet the behavioral split between those who reach expert level and those who plateau is identical.
Experts practice what they can’t do. Non-experts practice what they can.
This pattern almost certainly extends beyond music and skating. It likely shows up in every skill domain humans have ever attempted. Painters who focus on what they can already render well versus painters who attack their weak areas. Writers who write in the style they’ve already mastered versus writers who push into uncomfortable territory. Chefs who perfect their signature dish versus chefs who attempt techniques that intimidate them.
The pattern is so consistent across unrelated domains that it probably reflects something fundamental about human psychology rather than anything specific to music or skating or magic. We are wired to seek competence signals and avoid incompetence signals. The expert isn’t someone who lacks this wiring. The expert is someone who overrides it.
The Discipline of Sounding Terrible
This is the part that’s hardest to internalize, and I still struggle with it.
Good practice should sound bad most of the time. If your practice session sounds polished and impressive, you’re probably not working on the right material. You’re performing for yourself — or for anyone within earshot — rather than developing.
I had to learn to tolerate sounding terrible. To sit in a hotel room and produce ugly, halting, frustrating sounds without the compensating pleasure of playing the parts I’d already nailed. To resist the temptation to “just play through the whole thing once” as a reward for the difficult work, because that reward inevitably expanded to consume the session.
This is a genuine psychological discipline. It’s not about willpower in the brute-force sense. It’s about restructuring your relationship with the emotional feedback loop of practice.
The expert musician has learned that the sound of struggle is the sound of growth. The buzzing string, the flubbed note, the passage that falls apart on the fifth attempt — these sounds mean the adaptation mechanism is engaged. The practice is working precisely because it doesn’t sound like it’s working.
The amateur hasn’t learned this. Or has learned it intellectually but hasn’t internalized it emotionally. So they drift, session after session, back toward the passages that sound good.
How I Applied This to Card Work
When I made the jump from music to magic, I carried the amateur pattern with me without realizing it.
My early card practice sessions were essentially concert rehearsals. I’d run through my sequences from beginning to end. The parts I’d polished looked great — smooth, clean, invisible. The parts I was still developing looked rough. But instead of stopping to isolate and work on the rough parts, I’d push through them and enjoy the smooth ones.
The music research made me see this clearly. I was doing exactly what the amateur musicians did. Playing what sounded good — or in this case, what looked good — and tolerating what didn’t rather than fixing it.
The restructuring was straightforward in concept. Identify the weakest points in each routine. Isolate them. Spend the majority of practice time on those specific weak points. Resist the urge to run the whole routine until the isolated work is done.
In practice, it meant a lot of repetitions of the two-second transition that didn’t flow, rather than the five-minute sequence that did. It meant watching my hands do the same awkward movement fifty times, searching for the micro-adjustment that would smooth it out. It meant ending practice sessions having worked on maybe thirty seconds of material rather than running through an entire act.
It felt less productive. It felt like I was accomplishing less. The sessions were shorter on satisfaction and longer on frustration. But the weak points started improving at a rate that months of run-throughs had never achieved.
The Run-Through Illusion
Let me name the specific trap that caught me for the longest time: the run-through illusion.
A run-through is when you perform a routine from start to finish, as if in front of an audience. Run-throughs feel enormously productive. You’re practicing the whole thing. You’re working on timing, flow, transitions, the complete picture. It feels like the most serious kind of practice.
But a run-through allocates your time proportionally across the routine. If a routine is five minutes long and the weak point is a five-second transition, a run-through gives that transition five seconds of attention out of five minutes. That’s less than two percent of the practice time devoted to the element that needs the most development.
Run-throughs are essential. You need them for timing, for performance stamina, for flow. But they should be a small percentage of total practice time, not the default mode. The expert musician doesn’t run the whole piece repeatedly. They isolate, drill, and then run the piece occasionally to check integration.
I now do one run-through at the end of a practice session, as a diagnostic. It shows me where the isolated work has paid off and where there are still gaps. But the actual work — the time that produces improvement — happens in isolation, focused on the specific passages that don’t work yet.
What You Lose When You Only Play What Sounds Good
The amateur pattern isn’t just inefficient. Over time, it creates a specific kind of performer: someone who is exceptional at certain things and visibly weak at others. The polished sections of their work shine. The unpolished sections are obvious gaps.
Audiences notice. Not consciously, usually. They might not be able to articulate what felt off. But the inconsistency between the polished moments and the rough transitions creates a feeling of unevenness that undermines the whole performance.
Contrast this with someone who has spent disproportionate time on their weak points. Their performance might not have the extreme highs of the amateur’s best moments, but the consistency is higher. Every section is at a similar level. The whole thing flows. And that consistency of quality is what separates a polished performance from a collection of polished fragments separated by rough edges.
The Practice I Do Now
Every session begins with the question: what’s the weakest element in my current material?
Not what do I feel like working on. Not what’s the most enjoyable to practice. What’s the weakest element.
That element gets the first and best of my attention. I isolate it, I drill it, I work on it until I’ve either made measurable progress or exhausted my high-quality focus. Only then do I move to maintenance work, run-throughs, and the familiar material that keeps existing skills sharp.
This approach comes directly from recognizing myself in the music research. I was the amateur musician, playing what sounded good, wondering why the hard parts never improved. The data didn’t lie. The pattern was clear. The fix was available.
The fix just required accepting that productive practice doesn’t sound good, doesn’t look good, and doesn’t feel good. It sounds like struggle, looks like failure, and feels like frustration.
And that’s exactly how you know it’s working.