The thing about working in strategy consulting is that you learn to distrust assumptions. Especially your own. Every engagement starts with the same move: before you propose a solution, you gather data. You test whether the problem you think you’re solving is the problem that actually exists. You ask questions. Lots of questions. And you pay attention to the answers, especially when they surprise you.
So when I started getting serious about understanding practice — not just my own practice of magic, but the broader question of how humans develop skills — I went looking for data. And I found it in “Art of Practice,” where the author had done exactly what a consultant would do: run a structured survey across disciplines, designed to surface the actual frustrations, strategies, and emotional patterns that practitioners experience. The survey reached athletes, musicians, dancers, martial artists, magicians, visual artists, actors. Over five hundred people responded. The sample spanned professionals and amateurs, beginners and veterans, people who’d been practicing their craft for decades and people who’d started in the last few years.
The survey included seven specific questions. I’ll get into the details of those questions in the next post. For now, I want to talk about what the overall results revealed, because the finding was so consistent and so universal that it fundamentally changed how I think about the challenges of learning.
What I Expected to Find
Reading the survey results, I expected to find variation. Different disciplines, different problems. I assumed a violinist’s practice frustrations would be fundamentally different from a gymnast’s. That a painter’s challenges with skill development would have little overlap with a magician’s. That the specifics of each discipline would dominate, and any universal patterns would be faint signals buried under discipline-specific noise.
This assumption felt reasonable. After all, the physical demands of playing piano have almost nothing in common with the physical demands of rock climbing. The cognitive challenges of memorizing choreography are different from the cognitive challenges of learning card sleights. The performance contexts are different, the skill progressions are different, the training cultures are different. Why would the frustrations be the same?
I also expected that experience level would be a major variable. I assumed beginners would report different problems than experts. That someone five years into their discipline would have moved past the issues that plague someone in year one.
The data proved those assumptions wrong — almost all of them.
What the Data Showed
The responses had come in over about six weeks, and as the “Art of Practice” author described reading through every single one — not just the aggregated data, but every individual answer — a pattern emerged that was so consistent it was almost eerie.
The same words kept appearing. Plateau. Stuck. Frustrated. Inconsistent. The same strategies kept failing. “Just practice more.” “Push through it.” “Spend more time on it.” The same emotional patterns kept surfacing. Excitement at the beginning, frustration in the middle, doubt about whether improvement was even possible.
And this wasn’t clustering by discipline. It was everywhere.
A classical guitarist in Spain described feeling stuck on a passage she’d been working on for months — hitting the same wall, unable to break through despite hours of daily practice. A competitive swimmer in the American Midwest described the exact same pattern with a specific stroke technique. A jazz drummer in London. A ballet dancer in Vienna. A close-up magician in Tokyo. Different skills, different bodies, different contexts. Same frustration. Same language. Same emotional trajectory.
When the numbers were tallied, the universality became even more striking. Over eighty percent of respondents, regardless of discipline, identified plateaus as their primary frustration. Over seventy percent had tried “practice more hours” as their primary strategy for breaking through plateaus, and over sixty percent reported that this strategy had failed. The correlation between discipline and response was almost nonexistent. The correlation between experience level and response was marginally stronger but still weak.
In other words: a twenty-year professional violinist and a two-year amateur rock climber were reporting substantially the same frustrations, trying substantially the same failed strategies, and experiencing substantially the same emotional patterns around practice.
Why This Mattered to Me
I need to explain why reading these findings hit me as hard as it did, because on the surface it might sound like an academic curiosity. “Practice is hard for everyone.” Not exactly a revelation.
But consider the context. When I encountered this survey data, I was deep into my own practice struggles with magic. I’d been at it for a couple of years, I’d hit multiple plateaus, I’d tried the “practice more” approach and watched it fail, and I was carrying around a quiet but persistent belief that my frustrations were somehow unique to my situation.
I was an adult learner. I’d started late. I didn’t have the advantage of childhood neural plasticity. I wasn’t from a performing family. I was learning in hotel rooms between consulting gigs, not in a studio or a school or a community of peers. Surely my struggles were different from — and harder than — the struggles of people who’d been doing this since they were kids.
The survey data demolished that narrative. My frustrations weren’t unique. They weren’t even unusual. They were the standard experience of virtually everyone who practices anything, at any level, in any discipline. The plateau I was hitting wasn’t a function of my late start or my unusual learning environment. It was a structural feature of skill development itself.
This was simultaneously humbling and liberating. Humbling because it meant I wasn’t special — my struggles weren’t some heroic unique challenge. Liberating because it meant the struggles weren’t my fault. I wasn’t doing something wrong. I wasn’t uniquely unsuited for this. The frustrations I was experiencing were baked into the process.
The Structural Problem
Here’s the insight that crystallized from the data: the frustrations people experience in practice aren’t personal failures. They’re structural problems with how most people approach practice.
Think about it. If the same problems appear in every discipline, at every level, across cultures and contexts, then the cause can’t be discipline-specific. It can’t be individual talent or lack thereof. It has to be something more fundamental — something about the default approach to practice that most people share.
And that default approach, based on the survey data, looks like this: practice what you know until it’s comfortable, then try to add something harder, then retreat to comfort when the harder thing feels frustrating, then oscillate between comfort and frustration indefinitely. Measure progress by hours. Equate effort with improvement. When stuck, try harder rather than trying differently.
This is the approach almost everyone defaults to, regardless of discipline. It’s intuitive. It feels logical. And it produces predictable results: initial rapid improvement (when everything is new and any practice produces gains), followed by a plateau (when the easy gains are exhausted and the default approach stops producing meaningful adaptation), followed by frustration and often abandonment.
The survey confirmed what the practice literature suggests: the problem isn’t effort. The problem isn’t talent. The problem is strategy. And since most people never examine their practice strategy — they just do what feels natural — most people hit the same walls.
The Comfort of Company
I want to be honest about something: reading through those five hundred responses was one of the most comforting experiences of my learning journey.
Not because other people were struggling. I don’t take comfort in that. But because the universality of the struggle meant something important about the nature of the problem. If everyone hits the same walls, then the walls are features of the landscape, not deficiencies of the climber. And if the walls are features of the landscape, they can be mapped. Understood. Eventually, navigated.
Before encountering the survey data, my internal narrative around practice difficulties was self-blaming. “I should be better at this by now.” “Why can’t I get past this plateau?” “Maybe I just don’t have the talent for this.” After reading the data, the narrative shifted. “This plateau is a predictable stage in skill development.” “The strategy I’m using has a known failure mode.” “The frustration I’m feeling is universal and doesn’t indicate anything about my potential.”
The difference between those two narratives isn’t just emotional. It’s functional. The first narrative leads to self-doubt, reduced effort, and eventual abandonment. The second narrative leads to strategic thinking: if the plateau is a structural problem with a known cause, then there should be a structural solution. And there is. It’s everything I’ve been writing about in this series — deep-end practice, results-based measurement, the ten-percent-over-maximum principle, adaptation-focused training.
What the Survey Didn’t Show
A few things the survey data didn’t reveal, and they’re worth noting because they challenge some common assumptions.
The data didn’t show a strong correlation between talent and frustration levels. You’d think naturally talented people would be less frustrated. They weren’t. In many cases, the most talented respondents reported higher frustration, because their expectations outpaced their progress. They felt they should be improving faster, given their natural ability. The gap between expectation and reality was, if anything, wider for the gifted.
The data didn’t show a strong correlation between years of experience and having solved the practice problem. People who’d been at their discipline for twenty years reported many of the same frustrations as people who’d been at it for two. They’d learned to manage the frustration better, perhaps. They’d developed more patience. But the underlying challenges — plateaus, inconsistency, difficulty with new skills — were still present. Decades of practice hadn’t made them go away, because decades of practice without strategic change is just decades of the same default approach.
The data also didn’t show that any single discipline had cracked the code. I’d wondered whether fields with strong coaching traditions — Olympic sports, classical music — might show better outcomes. They didn’t, at least not dramatically. Better coaching helped with specific technical issues, but the fundamental frustrations of practice persisted across coached and self-taught practitioners alike.
The Bridge to Magic
For me, the most important takeaway was personal and specific. I’d been treating my practice challenges as magic problems. “Card sleights are hard.” “Misdirection is complicated.” “Performance is a unique skill.” And while those things are true, framing them as magic-specific problems led me to seek magic-specific solutions. Find a better tutorial. Watch more performances. Buy a different training deck.
The survey showed me that my problems weren’t magic problems. They were practice problems. The same ones everyone has. And practice problems require practice solutions — not discipline-specific band-aids, but fundamental changes to how you approach the process of skill development.
This reframe opened the door to learning from every discipline, not just magic. I started paying attention to how elite athletes train. How concert pianists structure their rehearsal. How surgeons maintain their skills. How chess players study. The principles of effective practice turned out to be remarkably consistent across all of these, and importing insights from one field into another became one of the most productive things I could do for my magic development.
Reading the survey of five hundred people across disciplines gave me permission to stop treating my struggles as personal and start treating them as solvable. That shift — from “what’s wrong with me?” to “what’s wrong with my approach?” — might be the most valuable thing I’ve learned in this entire journey.
The Questions That Drove It All
In the next post, I’ll walk through the seven specific questions from that survey and what the answers to each one revealed. Because the patterns that emerged from each individual question are as striking as the overall finding. The universality doesn’t just hold at the macro level — it holds question by question, frustration by frustration, failed strategy by failed strategy.
When five hundred people from different worlds give you the same answers, you stop looking for individual explanations and start looking for systemic ones. And systemic explanations, once identified, point to systemic solutions.