There’s a fear that lives in the minds of nearly everyone who’s invested significant time building a skill. It whispers every time you consider moving to harder material. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like wisdom. And it is absolute nonsense.
The fear goes like this: “If I start working on the harder technique, I’ll lose the easier one. I’ve spent months getting this right. If I shift my focus, all that work will erode. I need to keep practicing what I have before I can move on.”
I lived with this fear for longer than I’d like to admit. It kept me anchored to material I’d already mastered, running through routines I could do in my sleep, telling myself I was “maintaining” my skills when I was really just hiding from the discomfort of the next level.
The “Art of Practice” demolished this fear with an analogy so clean and so obvious that I felt slightly foolish for not having seen it on my own. The somersault analogy. And once I understood it, the invisible fence around my practice disappeared.
The Somersault Question
Imagine a gymnast who has mastered the single somersault. Solid. Consistent. Can land it every time with proper form. Now imagine that gymnast begins training the double somersault.
Here’s the question: will training the double cause the gymnast to lose the single?
The answer is so obviously no that the question almost seems absurd. Of course training a double somersault won’t erase the ability to do a single. The double somersault requires everything the single does — the takeoff, the tuck, the rotation, the spatial awareness, the landing — plus additional rotation speed, tighter body control, and more precise timing. Every component of the single somersault is embedded within the double.
You cannot practice the double without simultaneously exercising every skill that makes up the single.
This is the principle: when you move to a harder skill that is similar in nature to the easier one, you don’t lose the easier skill. The harder skill contains the easier skill within it. Practicing the harder version exercises all the components of the easier version, plus more.
The gymnast who trains the double somersault for six months and then goes back to the single will find the single laughably easy. Not rusty. Not eroded. Easier than it ever was, because the strength, coordination, and spatial awareness required for the double far exceed what the single demands.
My Version of the Fear
My own encounter with this fear was more mundane than double somersaults, but it felt just as paralyzing at the time.
By late 2017, I’d developed a solid foundation in basic card handling. I could execute the fundamental techniques cleanly, consistently, and with reasonable naturalness. I’d spent hundreds of hotel room hours getting to that point, and I was genuinely proud of the level I’d reached.
Then I started looking at more advanced techniques. And the fear materialized.
If I start working on these harder moves, will my basic handling suffer? I’ve just gotten my fundamentals to a good place. What if spending weeks struggling with advanced material causes my existing skills to get rusty? What if the new, harder movements create bad habits that contaminate the cleaner movements I already have?
These questions felt legitimate. They felt like responsible thinking — protecting an investment before risking it on something new. But they were rationalizations dressed up as prudence. What I was actually doing was avoiding the discomfort of being bad at something again.
I’d spent months going from incompetent to competent at basic card handling. The idea of voluntarily returning to incompetence — even at a higher level of material — was deeply unappealing. My ego had gotten comfortable with being good at something. Moving to harder material meant being bad at something again, and the fear of skill loss provided a convenient, intellectual-sounding excuse for staying put.
What Actually Happened When I Pushed Ahead
I eventually pushed through the fear. Not because I’d intellectually resolved it, but because I got bored. There’s only so many times you can run through material you’ve already mastered before the monotony becomes its own form of pain. The comfort zone, held too long, becomes a prison.
So I started working on more advanced material. And what happened was exactly what the somersault analogy predicted.
The first few sessions were rough. The new techniques were genuinely harder, and my success rate dropped from the comfortable ninety-plus percent I’d been enjoying down to something more like thirty or forty percent. My hands felt clumsy again. My timing was off. The smoothness I’d been so proud of vanished.
But here’s what I noticed: when I’d take a break from the advanced work and go back to the fundamentals — even just to warm up or to practice a complete routine — the basics felt different. They felt easier. Not rusty. Not degraded. Easier. More natural. More automatic.
This wasn’t a subtle effect. It was dramatic enough that I noticed it immediately. Techniques that had required a certain baseline of conscious attention now flowed without thought. Timing that had been good was now effortless. The basic handling that I’d been so afraid of losing was actually better than when I’d been explicitly practicing it.
The mechanism was exactly what the analogy predicted. The advanced techniques required everything the basic techniques required, plus more. By working at the higher level, I was exercising all the foundational skills at maximum capacity. When I returned to the lower level, those skills had headroom to spare. It was like training with ankle weights and then taking them off.
The Fear Is Emotional, Not Rational
Once I’d experienced this phenomenon firsthand, I started examining the fear itself. Where did it come from? Why did it feel so compelling when it was so demonstrably wrong?
The answer, I think, is that the fear is emotional, not rational. It’s rooted in loss aversion — the well-documented psychological tendency to feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains. Losing a skill you’ve built feels catastrophic. Gaining a new skill feels nice but doesn’t carry the same emotional weight.
So when your brain runs the scenario — “What if I lose my current skills?” — the emotional response is disproportionately intense. The potential loss triggers a protective instinct that has nothing to do with the actual probability of the loss occurring. It’s the same instinct that makes people hold losing investments too long. The fear of realizing the loss overrides the rational analysis of the situation.
In consulting, I saw this pattern constantly. Organizations that had invested heavily in a particular strategy or technology would resist moving to something better because they couldn’t bear the idea that the investment might be “wasted.” They’d rather keep polishing something they’d already built than risk it by pursuing something more challenging but more valuable.
The parallel to practice is exact. You’ve invested months in your current skills. Moving to harder material feels like putting that investment at risk. The emotional weight of potential loss overwhelms the rational understanding that the harder work will actually strengthen, not erode, the foundation.
The Qualifier That Matters
There’s one important qualifier to this principle, and it would be dishonest to skip it.
The harder skill needs to be similar in nature to the easier one.
A gymnast who stops practicing somersaults entirely to train discus throwing will, over time, see their somersault skill decline. The skills aren’t related enough. Discus doesn’t exercise the rotation, the tuck, the spatial awareness that somersaults require. The neural pathways supporting the somersault will weaken without specific activation.
The same is true in magic. If I stopped all card work to focus exclusively on, say, stage illusion design, my card handling would gradually decline. The skills don’t share enough common substrate.
But if I moved from basic card techniques to advanced card techniques, or from simple routines to complex routines using the same fundamental skill set, the earlier skills are protected. The harder work exercises the same neural pathways more intensively. The common substrate is being activated at a higher level.
This qualifier is important because it prevents the principle from being misapplied. It’s not a license to abandon practice of one skill family to work on a completely unrelated one and expect no consequences. It’s a reassurance that within a skill family, moving up the difficulty ladder strengthens everything below the rung you’re currently climbing.
The Liberation of Understanding This
Understanding this principle was genuinely liberating. The invisible fence that had kept me circling within comfortable material came down, and I could see the landscape beyond it.
I stopped spending twenty minutes of every practice session running through material I’d already mastered “just to maintain it.” That time was reallocated to working at the edge of my ability, where the adaptation mechanism actually fires. The maintenance I’d been doing was unnecessary, because the harder work was providing all the maintenance the fundamentals needed and then some.
I stopped feeling guilty when I noticed that I hadn’t explicitly practiced a particular basic technique in weeks. It was being practiced implicitly every time I worked on harder material that contained it as a component. The single somersault was being exercised every time I worked on the double.
And I stopped using “I need to maintain my current skills” as an excuse to avoid the discomfort of pushing into harder material. That excuse was gone, stripped of its intellectual respectability by a simple analogy about gymnastics.
The Broader Application
This principle extends well beyond magic or gymnastics.
The pianist who moves from intermediate repertoire to advanced repertoire doesn’t lose their ability to play intermediate pieces. The advanced work exercises all the technical and musical skills the intermediate work required, and more. Coming back to the intermediate piece after months of harder work, it feels like sight-reading something simple.
The writer who moves from short stories to novels doesn’t lose the ability to write short stories. The novelist’s craft encompasses everything short fiction demands, plus additional skills in structure, pacing, and sustained narrative. The writer who returns to short fiction after completing a novel finds it almost relaxing in its relative simplicity.
The athlete who moves from regional competition to national competition doesn’t lose the ability to compete regionally. The higher-level competition exercises every skill the lower level required, at greater intensity and precision.
In every case, the harder version protects the easier version. The prerequisite skills don’t atrophy — they strengthen, because they’re being demanded at a higher level than the easier task ever required.
What I’d Tell My Earlier Self
If I could go back to 2017 and talk to the version of myself who was afraid to move beyond the basics, I’d say this:
The fear you’re feeling isn’t protecting your skills. It’s preventing their growth. Every week you spend polishing material you’ve already mastered is a week you’re not spending in the zone where real improvement happens. And the thing you’re trying to protect — your current level — isn’t at risk from harder work. It’s at risk from stagnation.
Move up. Push into the harder material. Accept the temporary drop in success rate. Accept being bad at something new. The foundations you’ve built aren’t going anywhere. They’re about to get stronger than they’ve ever been, precisely because you’re going to start demanding more from them.
The single somersault doesn’t disappear when you train the double.
It becomes the easiest thing in your repertoire.