This is post sixty-five. The last one in this series.
When I started writing these posts, I thought I was writing about practice. About the mechanics of skill development — adaptation pressure, difficulty calibration, results-based measurement, the sweet spot that sits ten percent above your current maximum. And I was writing about those things. But sitting here now, looking back at the full arc, I realize what I was actually writing about was a transformation. Not in my card work. In how I think.
The person who bought his first deck of cards from an online magic shop and started watching tutorials in a hotel room in 2016 was not fundamentally different, in terms of manual dexterity or natural talent, from the person writing this today. My hands are the same hands. My brain is the same brain. I didn’t discover a hidden aptitude or unlock some dormant ability. What changed was the operating system running on that brain. The way I approach learning. The assumptions I make about progress. The framework I use to evaluate whether what I’m doing is working.
That operating system upgrade is what this entire series has been about. And it’s what made everything that came after — the performances, the company, the partnership with Adam Wilber, the journey into mentalism — possible.
The Before
Let me paint the honest picture of where I started.
It’s late 2016. I’m a strategy and innovation consultant based in Austria, spending roughly two hundred nights a year in hotels across Europe. My other passion — music — doesn’t travel well. I can’t bring instruments on business trips, and I need something to occupy my mind and hands in the dead hours between client meetings and sleep.
A deck of cards fits in a jacket pocket. Online video tutorials stream on a laptop. It’s the perfect intersection of portability and depth. So I buy a deck, I buy some tutorials from an online magic shop, and I start learning.
My approach is the default human approach: watch, imitate, repeat. I see a technique in a tutorial, I try to replicate it, and I repeat it until it works. When it doesn’t work, I repeat it more. When it still doesn’t work, I watch the tutorial again and repeat some more. I measure my practice by hours. I feel good about long sessions. I feel guilty about short ones. I have no framework for evaluating whether my approach is productive. I have no metrics for progress beyond a vague sense of “that felt better” or “that felt worse.”
This approach produces results, initially. The early weeks are exhilarating. I’m genuinely starting from zero, which means every single session yields visible improvement. Movements that were impossible yesterday are merely difficult today. The cards begin to do things I couldn’t have imagined doing with my own hands. The learning curve is steep and the progress is fast and I assume this trajectory will continue indefinitely.
It doesn’t. The plateaus arrive. The success rates stall. The hours pile up without corresponding improvement. And my response — the universal human response — is to work harder. More hours. More repetitions. More grinding. Because that’s what everyone says to do, and because I don’t have a better idea.
The Shift
The shift didn’t happen in a single moment. It accumulated across months and years, one insight at a time. But if I had to identify the fulcrum — the point where the old approach started giving way to the new one — it was the night in an Innsbruck hotel room when I started reading the “Art of Practice” framework and encountered the idea of naturals versus non-naturals.
The concept was simple: elite performers in any discipline tend to instinctively use practice strategies that align with how skill development actually works. They don’t know they’re doing it. They can’t explain it. But their default approach happens to be effective. Everyone else — the vast majority of us — defaults to practice strategies that feel logical but actually work against the mechanisms of adaptation.
This was the first crack in my assumption that effort was the primary variable in practice. It introduced the possibility that approach mattered more than intensity. That you could be working incredibly hard and making almost no progress, not because you lacked talent, but because your practice strategy was misaligned with how your brain actually builds skills.
Everything else followed from there. The results-based measurement that replaced my hour-counting. The deep-end practice that flipped my session structure. The ten-percent-over-maximum principle that gave me a calibration tool for difficulty. The towards orientation that changed the emotional quality of my sessions. The understanding of plateaus as consolidation, not failure. The recognition that bad days are data, not weather.
Each insight was a small adjustment. None of them required more time or more effort. All of them produced outsized results. And collectively, they amounted to a complete overhaul of how I thought about the process of getting better at something.
What Actually Changed: Five Transformations
Looking back, I can identify five specific transformations that defined the journey from that first hotel room deck to where I am now. None of them are about technique. All of them are about thinking.
Transformation One: From Effort-First to Strategy-First
The most fundamental shift. Before: progress equals effort. More practice equals more improvement. The path to mastery is paved with hours. After: progress equals strategy multiplied by effort. The direction of practice matters more than the volume of practice. Five minutes of thinking about what to practice is worth more than an hour of undirected repetition.
This sounds obvious when stated plainly. It was anything but obvious when I was living it. The cultural programming around effort is deep. The belief that hard work is the answer to everything is reinforced by every institution from school to the workplace. Unlearning it — truly unlearning it at the behavioral level, not just intellectually — took years.
Transformation Two: From Feeling-Based to Data-Based
Before: a practice session was good if it felt productive. Progress was happening if I felt like I was improving. The evaluation was entirely subjective, entirely emotional, and entirely unreliable. After: a practice session was evaluated by specific metrics. Success rates on defined techniques. Measurable outcomes. Data that could be tracked over time and analyzed for patterns.
This shift was the consulting part of my brain finally asserting itself in my practice life. I’d spent years helping clients replace gut-feel decision-making with data-driven analysis. It took me embarrassingly long to apply the same principle to my own skill development. Once I did, the fog of subjective evaluation lifted and I could see, clearly and numerically, what was working and what wasn’t.
Transformation Three: From Comfort-Seeking to Edge-Seeking
Before: practice gravitated toward comfortable material. The techniques I could already execute. The routines I could already perform. The success felt good and the sessions were pleasant. After: practice targeted the edge of my ability. The stuff I couldn’t yet do. The techniques at the boundary between achievable and impossible. The sessions were less pleasant but infinitely more productive.
This was the hardest transformation emotionally. Comfort-seeking practice feels good. Edge-seeking practice feels frustrating, effortful, often discouraging. The only thing that made it sustainable was the data showing that edge practice produced ten times the improvement per minute invested. The numbers were compelling enough to override the emotional preference for comfort.
Transformation Four: From Linear Expectations to Nonlinear Understanding
Before: I expected progress to be proportional to effort. If I practiced twice as much, I should improve twice as fast. Plateaus were failures. Regression was catastrophe. After: I understood that progress is nonlinear. That plateaus are consolidation phases. That apparent regression is often a precursor to breakthrough. That the staircase model of improvement — flat, jump, flat, jump — is how skills actually develop.
This transformation was almost entirely psychological, but its practical impact was enormous. When you expect linear progress and get nonlinear reality, every plateau is a crisis. When you expect nonlinear progress and get exactly that, every plateau is a phase. The difference in emotional sustainability is the difference between quitting and persisting.
Transformation Five: From Isolated Practitioner to System Thinker
Before: practice was something I did alone in hotel rooms. An isolated activity disconnected from the rest of my life and work. After: practice was a system embedded in the larger system of my life. Fatigue from consulting affected practice quality. Stress from work required recovery periods. Travel schedules needed to be accounted for in practice planning. Practice wasn’t a box I entered and exited. It was a thread woven through everything else.
This was the transformation that turned me from someone who practices magic into someone who understands how skill development works. And it’s the one that had implications far beyond card techniques.
The Bridge to Everything Else
The practice principles I learned through magic didn’t stay in magic. They bled into everything.
When Adam Wilber and I started talking about what would become Vulpine Creations, my approach to building the company was fundamentally shaped by these principles. Strategy over effort. Data over feeling. Edge-seeking over comfort-seeking. Nonlinear expectations. Systems thinking.
Adam and I met because I’d invited him to keynote an event I was hosting in London. We hit it off. The conversation eventually turned to collaboration, and then to building something together. But the foundation that made me a viable partner in a magic company wasn’t my card technique or my performance skills — it was the systematic approach to learning and development that this practice journey had installed.
When we needed to develop new products, I approached the process the same way I’d learned to approach practice: identify the specific problem, find the optimal difficulty level, measure results, iterate strategically. When we faced setbacks, I recognized them as nonlinear progress rather than failure. When the impulse arose to just push harder, I caught it and redirected toward strategic analysis.
The practice revolution, it turned out, wasn’t really about practice. It was about learning to learn. And once you know how to learn, the specific subject matter becomes almost secondary. The operating system transfers.
What I Got Wrong
I want to be honest about what I got wrong along the way, because the risk of a sixty-five-post series is that it sounds like a triumphant march from ignorance to mastery. It wasn’t.
I got wrong the timeline. I expected the transformation to be faster than it was. Even after understanding the principles, implementing them consistently took years, not months. Old habits are deeply grooved. The default approach reasserts itself constantly. Knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are separated by a vast and persistent gap.
I got wrong the completeness. I thought that mastering the practice side meant I was prepared. Prepared for what, I wasn’t specific about, but I had a general sense that if I could execute techniques at a high level, I was ready. Ready for performing. Ready for audiences. Ready for the transition from private practice to public presentation.
I was spectacularly wrong about this. And that wrongness is, in a way, the perfect bridge to what comes next.
What Comes Next
Because here’s the truth that sixty-five posts of practice methodology didn’t prepare me for: performing is a completely different skill.
I could execute techniques flawlessly in a hotel room. I could hit ninety-five percent success rates on demanding card work. I could structure practice sessions with the precision of a consulting engagement. And then I’d stand in front of an actual human being, and everything would fall apart.
Not the technique. The technique held. What fell apart was everything around it. The words. The timing. The ability to connect with another person while simultaneously managing the technical demands of the effect. The discovery that holding an audience’s attention requires a set of skills that has almost nothing to do with the physical mechanics I’d spent years refining.
Practice taught me how to build skills in isolation. It didn’t teach me how to deploy those skills in the presence of other humans. And the gap between those two things — between private competence and public performance — turned out to be wider, deeper, and more interesting than anything I’d encountered in the practice world.
That gap is where the next part of this story lives. The shift from practicing alone to performing for audiences. The discovery of frameworks for entertainment and connection that are as rigorous as the practice frameworks I’d already learned. The realization that mastering your craft is only the first step, and that the steps that follow require a fundamentally different kind of thinking.
I’ll get into that next. Different category. Different source material. Different challenges entirely.
The One Thing
But before I move on, I want to name the single most important thing I learned across these sixty-five posts, because if someone reads only one paragraph of this entire series, it should be this one.
The thing that changed wasn’t my technique. It wasn’t my talent. It wasn’t even my discipline, though discipline was necessary. The thing that changed was my relationship with the process of learning itself. I stopped treating practice as a black box where you insert effort and extract skill. I started treating it as a system with identifiable inputs, measurable outputs, and adjustable parameters. A system you can study, understand, and optimize.
That shift — from practice as ritual to practice as engineering — made everything else possible. The hotel room card tricks. The partnership with Adam. The company we built. The performances that followed. The continuing journey into mentalism and stage work that still, to this day, challenges and surprises me.
It all started with a deck of cards, a laptop, and a willingness to question whether the way I was practicing was actually working.
Sixty-five posts later, I know the answer. It wasn’t. And the discovery of what actually works was the most valuable education I’ve ever received.
Not in magic. In everything.