There’s a line that Ken Weber relays in Maximum Entertainment, attributed to the mentalist Bob Cassidy, that rearranged my understanding of what it means to do difficult work. The line is this: “The hard way is actually the easy way.”
The first time I read it, I thought it was a cute paradox. The kind of fortune-cookie wisdom that sounds profound until you try to apply it. The hard way is actually the easy way. Sure. Right. Tell that to the version of me sitting alone in a hotel room in Prague at eleven at night, drilling the same technique for the hundredth time while everyone else from the client dinner was at the bar downstairs.
But then I thought about it longer. And I realized Cassidy wasn’t offering motivation. He was offering a diagnosis. He was describing a phenomenon that anyone who has committed to serious, sustained practice has experienced: the paradox of difficulty that eventually gives way to ease.
What the Hard Way Looks Like
Let me describe the hard way as I’ve experienced it.
The hard way is deciding, when you’re already tired from a full day of consulting work, that you’re going to spend forty-five minutes practicing before bed. Not because you feel like it. Not because it’s fun in that moment. Because you committed to a practice schedule and you’re going to honor it.
The hard way is working on a single technique for weeks after the initial excitement has worn off and the improvement curve has flattened. Sitting with the tedium. Sitting with the discomfort of not being good enough yet. Resisting the urge to move on to something more stimulating.
The hard way is recording yourself performing and then watching the playback with honest eyes. Seeing the hesitations you didn’t know you had. Hearing the filler words you thought you’d eliminated. Noticing the body language that communicates the opposite of what you intended.
The hard way is scripting your routines word by word, rehearsing them until they’re locked in, and then continuing to rehearse long after the point where “good enough” has been reached, because good enough isn’t the standard you’ve chosen.
The hard way is saying no to new material because you haven’t finished mastering the old. It’s declining the dopamine of novelty in favor of the slow, invisible accumulation of depth.
The hard way is lonely. It happens in hotel rooms and late-night practice sessions and solitary video reviews. There’s no audience to validate you, no social media engagement to measure yourself by, no external reward system. The only feedback is the slowly improving quality of what you do, and some days even that is hard to perceive.
That’s the hard way. It sounds punishing. So why would anyone call it the easy way?
What the Easy Way Looks Like
Because the alternative — the “easy way” — only looks easy from the outside.
The easy way is learning a lot of effects at a surface level and performing them before they’re ready. It’s chasing novelty instead of depth. It’s buying the latest trick release and learning it just well enough to add it to the repertoire without ever pushing any single piece of material to its potential.
The easy way is copying other performers’ presentations instead of developing your own. It’s borrowing someone else’s patter because writing your own takes time and honest self-examination that you’d rather avoid. It’s adopting a character that isn’t yours because building one from scratch requires the kind of deep self-knowledge that only comes from solitary reflection.
The easy way is performing without a script, relying on improvisation not because you’ve earned the right to improvise through deep preparation but because writing and memorizing a script is work you’d rather skip. It’s going onstage without having rehearsed the full set because you “know the material well enough.”
The easy way is avoiding honest criticism. Never recording yourself. Never asking a trusted colleague for feedback. Never watching your own performance with the clinical eye of someone trying to improve rather than the forgiving eye of someone trying to feel good.
The easy way is comfortable in the short term and catastrophic in the long term. Because the easy way leads, inevitably, to a performer who has been doing this for years and is no better than they were at year two. They have experience but not depth. They have a repertoire but not mastery. They have performing credits but not the quality of performance that those credits should represent.
That’s what Weber means when he says the easy way becomes hard. It becomes hard because it leads to mediocrity, and mediocrity is a trap that’s almost impossible to escape once you’ve settled into it. The habits of the easy way — shallow practice, borrowed material, avoided criticism — become entrenched over time. They feel normal. They feel like “how I do things.” Breaking them requires more effort than building them right in the first place would have.
The Paradox Explained
So here’s the paradox, unpacked.
The hard way is actually easy because focused, disciplined work produces clear results. When you commit to deep practice on a small number of effects, you get better. The improvement is measurable. The feedback loop is tight. Each session builds on the last. There’s a directness to the process that is almost relaxing once you surrender to it.
When I’m in the middle of a focused practice session — working on one specific aspect of one specific routine, measuring progress, making incremental refinements — there’s a clarity that descends on the work. There’s no decision fatigue about what to practice next, because the plan is set. There’s no anxiety about falling behind on other material, because I’ve deliberately narrowed my focus. There are no distractions, because I’m alone in a hotel room with a deck of cards and a specific objective.
The distractions evaporate. That’s Cassidy’s key insight. The hard way isn’t just about willpower and discipline. It’s about the fact that when you commit fully to the difficult path, much of what makes other paths stressful simply disappears. The anxiety of juggling too many effects. The guilt of shallow practice. The nagging awareness that you’re not pushing yourself. The comparison with performers who seem further ahead.
All of that noise goes quiet when you’re fully engaged in deep work. The hard way produces a kind of peace that the easy way never can. And that peace — that absence of distraction, that clarity of purpose — is what makes the hard way sustainable. It doesn’t require constant motivation because the work itself becomes its own reward.
My Experience of the Shift
I can point to the period when this shifted for me. It was late 2018, maybe early 2019. I’d been following the practice frameworks from the first section of this blog — the systematic approaches to deliberate practice, the measurement of results over hours, the identification of specific breakdown points. And I’d been applying Weber’s depth-over-breadth principle, narrowing my active repertoire and investing serious time in the effects I’d kept.
The shift wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment of revelation. It was more like a gradual dawning: the work that had felt grueling at the beginning had become something closer to satisfying. Not easy in the sense of effortless — the sessions were still demanding, still required concentration, still pushed against my limits. But easy in the sense of natural. The resistance was gone. The decision fatigue was gone. The inner argument about whether to practice or do something more immediately pleasurable was gone.
I’d sit down after a client dinner in some hotel in Vienna or Amsterdam, pick up the cards, and the session would begin without hesitation. Not because I was more disciplined than before, but because the path was so clear that discipline was almost unnecessary. I knew what I was working on. I knew what “better” looked like. I knew the specific adjustments I was making. The work had its own momentum.
And here’s the thing that confirmed Cassidy’s paradox for me: during this same period, I noticed that other performers who had started around the same time as me — people who had initially progressed faster because they were learning more effects, accumulating more material, performing more frequently — were starting to stall. They had broader repertoires but flatter growth curves. They’d done the easy thing — spreading wide instead of going deep — and now the lack of depth was catching up with them. Their performances weren’t getting better. Their audiences weren’t responding more strongly. They were busy, but they weren’t improving.
The easy way had become hard for them. The hard way had become easy for me. Not because I was more talented. Because the paths diverge over time, and the hard way compounds while the easy way plateaus.
The Consulting Connection
In my consulting work, I see the same paradox play out in organizations. The companies that do the hard thing early — investing in infrastructure before it’s urgent, building processes before they’re needed, training people before the crisis hits — look like they’re wasting resources in the short term. Their competitors, who skip those investments and go straight to market, look faster and smarter.
Five years later, the picture inverts. The company that built the foundation is scaling effortlessly because the systems are in place. The company that skipped the foundation is drowning in technical debt, operational chaos, and cultural dysfunction. The hard way became easy. The easy way became hard.
I’ve delivered this message in boardrooms so many times that you’d think I would have applied it to my own learning without needing Cassidy and Weber to point it out. But the human capacity for seeing a principle clearly in others while being blind to it in ourselves is apparently limitless.
The Solitary Hours
There’s one more dimension to this that I want to name, because it’s the part that gets overlooked most often.
The hard way is solitary. That’s not an incidental feature of the hard way — it’s central to it. The deep work of mastery happens alone. In hotel rooms, in practice spaces, in late-night sessions where no one is watching and no one is offering praise. The solitude is what makes the work possible, because there are no social pressures to perform before you’re ready, no audience expectations to manage, no ego to protect.
Weber describes the successful performers of his acquaintance as people who consciously chose solitary hours of study and development. They thrive on it. They understand that the solitude isn’t a cost of the hard way — it’s a feature. It’s where the distractions evaporate, where the focus sharpens, where the real work happens.
I came to magic as an adult who spent two hundred nights a year in hotels. I was already intimately familiar with solitude, though I hadn’t thought of it as an asset. It was a byproduct of the consulting lifestyle, something I managed rather than leveraged. Weber and Cassidy helped me reframe it. Those hotel rooms weren’t isolation. They were studios. The solitude wasn’t a burden. It was the condition under which deep work could flourish.
The hard way is actually the easy way. Not because it feels easy — it doesn’t, especially at the start. But because it works. Because it compounds. Because it produces something real and durable. Because the distractions that make the easy way so appealing eventually evaporate in the heat of focused effort, and what remains is the work itself, clear and direct and sufficient.
The easy way promises comfort and delivers frustration. The hard way promises difficulty and delivers freedom. That’s the paradox. And the sooner you stop trying to resolve it intellectually and start experiencing it through practice, the sooner it stops being a paradox and starts being simply the way things are.