In the last post, I talked about the survey from “Art of Practice” — five hundred athletes, artists, and performers across disciplines — and the surprising universality of the results. Now I want to go deeper. Because the seven specific questions in that survey — and the patterns that emerged from each — tell a story that’s even more revealing than the aggregate finding.
Each question was designed to probe a different dimension of the practice experience. Together, they paint a detailed picture of how most people practice, where most people get stuck, and what most people have tried and failed to fix it. The consistency of the answers across disciplines was striking enough to reshape how I think about skill development.
Here are the seven questions and what the answers revealed.
Question 1: What is your biggest challenge or frustration in practice?
This was the opening question, and the answer was overwhelmingly consistent: plateaus.
Not difficulty. Not lack of time. Not boredom. Plateaus. The experience of practicing consistently and feeling like nothing is changing. The wall that appears after the initial phase of rapid improvement, where the gap between effort invested and progress experienced becomes intolerably wide.
Over eighty percent of respondents named some version of this as their primary frustration. The language varied — “hitting a ceiling,” “being stuck,” “not improving despite effort,” “feeling like I’m running in place” — but the underlying experience was identical.
What struck me was how emotionally loaded the responses were. These weren’t dispassionate descriptions of a technical problem. They were expressions of genuine suffering. People felt betrayed by the process. They’d been told that practice makes perfect, they’d done the practice, and the perfection hadn’t arrived. The implicit promise of the practice equation — input effort, receive improvement — had been broken.
I recognized myself in every single response. That feeling of sitting in a hotel room in Klagenfurt or Milan, running through the same card work for the third consecutive week, seeing the same mediocre success rates, and wondering what the point was. The plateau experience is uniquely demoralizing because it attacks your sense of agency. You’re doing the thing you’ve been told to do, and it isn’t working. What else is there?
Question 2: What strategies have you tried that didn’t work?
The number one failed strategy, cited by over seventy percent of respondents: practice more.
Not practice differently. Practice more. When progress stalled, the default response was to increase volume. More hours. More repetitions. More sessions per week. The assumption being that the relationship between effort and improvement is linear, and if improvement has stalled, the fix is more effort.
This is such an intuitive response that it barely seems like a strategy. Of course you practice more when you’re stuck. What else would you do? And yet the data was clear: for the vast majority of respondents, practicing more had not resolved their plateaus. In many cases, it had made things worse — leading to fatigue, frustration, injury, and eventual burnout.
The second most common failed strategy was repetition of comfortable material. People would retreat to what they could already do, practice it until it was polished to a mirror shine, and hope that the comfort and confidence would somehow transfer to the harder material they were stuck on. It didn’t. Comfortable repetition is maintenance, not growth. It feels productive without being productive.
The third was seeking new instruction. A new teacher, a new tutorial, a new book, a new method. The assumption being that the problem was knowledge — they just didn’t know the right way to do it. Sometimes new instruction helped. More often, it produced a brief burst of renewed enthusiasm (the novelty effect) followed by the same plateau.
I’d tried all three of these strategies myself. I’d practiced more. I’d retreated to comfortable material. I’d bought new tutorials. Reading five hundred people describe doing the exact same things and getting the exact same non-results was both validating and slightly embarrassing.
Question 3: What mistakes do others repeat that you’ve overcome?
This question was designed to surface hard-won insights — the things experienced practitioners had figured out through painful trial and error. The most common answer was a version of: spending too long on material that’s already comfortable.
Respondents across disciplines described a pattern they’d recognized in others (and often in their own past selves): the tendency to spend the majority of practice time on material that is already within your ability. To run through the repertoire rather than working on the gaps. To polish the first page of the piece rather than struggling through the fifth. To perform the tricks you can already perform rather than drilling the techniques you can’t yet execute.
The insight these respondents had reached was that practice time spent within your comfort zone is essentially wasted, at least from a development standpoint. Real improvement only happens at the edge. But reaching this insight hadn’t been easy — most described years of comfortable practice before the realization clicked.
Other common answers included: not warming up properly (leading to sloppy practice that reinforces bad habits), not breaking skills down into small enough components (trying to practice the whole instead of the parts), and not recording or measuring progress (practicing blind, with no objective feedback on whether anything is improving).
Question 4: What is your biggest difficulty when learning a new skill?
The dominant answer here was fear of regression. When respondents tried to learn something new and difficult, their primary anxiety wasn’t about the new skill itself — it was about losing proficiency in skills they’d already developed.
This was illuminating. The concern wasn’t “I can’t learn this new thing.” It was “If I focus on this new thing, I’ll lose the old things.” The fear of regression creates a powerful psychological pull toward maintenance practice. If your existing skills feel fragile — if you worry that a week away from them will cause meaningful decay — then you’ll naturally prioritize maintaining them over developing new ones.
I related to this more than any other finding. Every time I tried to add a new technique or effect to my repertoire, I felt the tug of the old material. The voice saying: “You should run through your existing stuff first, make sure it’s still sharp.” And by the time I’d done that, the session was half over and my energy for learning something new was depleted.
The survey data suggested this fear is mostly unfounded. Respondents who had overcome it described finding that established skills decay much more slowly than expected, and that temporary regression is quickly recovered once you return to the old material. But the fear itself is incredibly persistent, and it shapes practice behavior in ways that most people don’t consciously recognize.
Question 5: What makes you dissatisfied in practice?
The overwhelming answer: feeling stuck despite effort. Closely related to the plateau frustration from Question 1, but with a specific emphasis on the relationship between effort and results.
People can tolerate difficulty. They can tolerate slow progress. What they cannot tolerate is the absence of any perceived connection between what they put in and what they get out. When effort feels productive — when you can see, even faintly, that what you’re doing is working — frustration is manageable. When effort feels futile — when you’re putting in the hours and seeing nothing change — frustration becomes corrosive.
This finding reinforced the importance of results-based measurement. If you’re measuring by hours, you’ll always know you’re investing effort. But you won’t know whether that effort is producing anything. If you’re measuring by success rates or specific performance metrics, you’ll have a feedback loop — even a slow one — that connects effort to outcome. That feedback loop is psychologically essential. Without it, the motivation to continue practice erodes.
Several respondents described dissatisfaction not just with plateaus but with the quality of their practice sessions. They were dissatisfied when they knew they’d been unfocused, when they’d gone through the motions, when they’d spent time but not attention. This meta-awareness — knowing that you’re practicing badly while you’re doing it — was surprisingly common and surprisingly demoralizing.
Question 6: Do you feel you started too late?
Nearly everyone said yes.
This was the finding I least expected and most needed. Regardless of when they actually started — childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age — the majority of respondents felt they’d started too late. The eight-year-old who started piano at six felt they should have started at four. The teenager who started gymnastics at twelve felt they should have started at eight. The adult who picked up a new instrument at thirty felt the window had closed at twenty.
The universality of this feeling was almost comical. If everyone feels they started too late, then the feeling clearly isn’t correlated with actual start time. It’s a cognitive distortion — a comparison between where you are and where you imagine you’d be if you’d started earlier. And since you can always imagine an earlier start, you can always feel behind.
For me, this was profoundly reassuring. I’d started magic as an adult professional, well past the age when most magicians begin. The “too late” voice was loud and persistent. Reading that this voice is essentially universal — that even people who started as children hear it — helped me recognize it for what it is: noise, not signal.
The few respondents who didn’t feel they’d started too late shared an interesting common trait: they measured their progress against their own past rather than against others who’d started earlier. They weren’t comparing themselves to prodigies. They were comparing themselves to where they’d been six months or a year ago. And by that measure, they were always making progress, regardless of when they’d started.
Question 7: If you could have one question answered about practice, what would it be?
The most common question, by a significant margin: “How do I break through plateaus?”
Which is, of course, the same frustration expressed in Question 1, now framed as a demand for a solution. The consistency was almost circular: the biggest frustration is plateaus, the failed strategies don’t fix plateaus, and the one thing people most want to know is how to fix plateaus. The entire practice problem, for most people in most disciplines, reduces to the plateau problem.
The second most common question was some version of: “How do I know if I’m practicing effectively?” This gets at the measurement problem. People are investing significant time and effort but have no reliable way to assess whether their approach is working. They’re flying blind and they know it.
The third was: “How much should I practice?” Which, given the failure of the “practice more” strategy identified in Question 2, reveals a persistent belief that the answer lies in finding the right amount of practice — the Goldilocks volume that will produce consistent improvement. This belief persists despite evidence that volume is far less important than approach.
The Map That Emerged
Taken together, the seven questions draw a map of universal practice frustration. The terrain looks like this:
People start learning a skill. They improve rapidly at first, because anything is better than nothing and the early gains come easy. Then they hit a plateau. They respond by practicing more, which doesn’t work. They retreat to comfortable material, which doesn’t work. They seek new instruction, which provides temporary relief but doesn’t resolve the underlying problem.
Meanwhile, they fear regression in their existing skills, which keeps them tethered to maintenance practice. They feel dissatisfied because effort isn’t producing visible results. They believe they started too late, which adds a layer of self-doubt to the frustration. And if they could ask one question, it would be: how do I get unstuck?
This map is the same for a violinist in Madrid, a martial artist in Seoul, a magician in an Austrian hotel room, and a dancer in New York. The landmarks are identical. The emotional weather is identical. The failed detours are identical.
And if the map is universal, then the solution — the route through the terrain — should be universal too. That’s what this entire series has been building toward. Not magic-specific advice, but universal practice principles that work because they address the structural problems that everyone shares.
The survey didn’t just confirm what I’d been reading and experiencing. It gave me the confidence to trust that the principles I was discovering weren’t niche or discipline-specific. They were fundamental. And they apply to whatever you’re trying to learn, whether it’s card sleights or concertos or corporate presentations.
The next question, naturally, is: if more effort isn’t the answer, what is? The answer is strategy. And that’s where we’re going next.