In the last post, I explored the paradox that the hard way is actually the easy way — Bob Cassidy’s insight as relayed through Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment. But there’s a second layer to Cassidy’s thinking that deserves its own exploration, because it addresses something that goes beyond practice discipline. It addresses freedom.
The idea is this: rigorous, sustained, difficult practice doesn’t just make you better. It makes you free. Free to be present. Free to respond to the moment. Free to connect with the audience instead of managing your technique. Free, ultimately, to be the performer you’re capable of being rather than the technician your under-preparation forces you to be.
This is the real payoff of the hard path, and it’s the one that’s hardest to appreciate until you’ve experienced it.
The Constraint-Freedom Paradox
There’s a paradox at the heart of every skilled discipline: constraint produces freedom.
The jazz musician who has spent years internalizing scales, chord progressions, and harmonic theory can improvise freely in the moment. The musician who skipped that foundational work and went straight to “playing by ear” is limited to a narrow range of patterns and cannot adapt when the music goes somewhere unexpected.
The chef who has mastered classical technique can improvise confidently because she understands the principles behind every dish. The self-taught cook who never learned the fundamentals can replicate specific recipes but falls apart when something unexpected happens.
The consultant — and yes, I’m drawing on my own world again — who has deeply prepared for a client meeting can improvise when the conversation goes sideways. She can field unexpected questions, adjust her recommendations in real time, and respond to the room’s energy because her preparation has given her a foundation solid enough to deviate from. The consultant who hasn’t prepared is locked into his slides, unable to deviate without losing his thread.
In every case, the pattern is the same. The person who did the harder preparatory work has more freedom in the moment. The person who took shortcuts has less. Constraint — in the form of disciplined practice and deep preparation — doesn’t limit what you can do on stage. It multiplies it.
What Freedom Looks Like in Performance
Let me make this concrete. When I first started performing, my conscious attention during a show was almost entirely consumed by technique. Where are the cards? Is the setup correct? Did I execute that cleanly? What comes next in the routine? Am I holding this naturally? The technical management of the performance occupied perhaps eighty percent of my mental bandwidth.
That left maybe twenty percent for everything else. Everything else being: reading the audience’s reactions. Adjusting my timing to the room’s energy. Making eye contact. Being genuinely present in the conversation rather than reciting memorized patter. Noticing the person in the third row who looks confused and addressing that. Responding to a spectator’s comment with genuine humor rather than a scripted line.
In other words, the twenty percent that was left over after technical management was the entire human dimension of performance. The connecting. The communicating. The part that actually makes magic feel like magic rather than a demonstration of manual skill.
Eighty percent occupied by technique. Twenty percent available for humanity. That’s a performer in chains.
Now contrast that with a performance where technique has been practiced to the point of automaticity. Where every handling, every script line, every transition has been drilled so many times that it operates below the level of conscious thought. Suddenly the ratio flips. Maybe ten percent of conscious attention goes to technique — a background awareness, a gentle monitoring rather than active management. That leaves ninety percent for the audience.
Ninety percent. That’s a completely different performance experience. That’s the freedom Cassidy was talking about. Not freedom from practice, but freedom through practice. The freedom that exists on the other side of the constraint.
My Moment of Realization
I can identify the specific performance when this shift first happened for me. It was at a private event in Vienna, about three years into my journey. I was performing a card routine I’d worked extensively — one of the three effects from my focused-practice period. I’d rehearsed it so many times that the technical dimension had genuinely become automatic.
Midway through the routine, something happened that would have derailed me a year earlier. A woman in the group made a comment — something playful and unexpected, not disruptive but definitely not in my script. In the past, I would have either ignored the comment to stay on track or lost my place trying to respond to it. Both options were bad: ignoring the comment would have made me seem robotic, and losing my place would have broken the flow.
But on this night, something different happened. I responded to her comment naturally, with a line that connected her remark to what I was about to do next. The group laughed. The moment felt spontaneous and genuine. And the entire time, my hands were doing what they needed to do. The technique continued underneath the conversation like a river running under a bridge. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to pause the human interaction to manage the mechanical one. Both happened simultaneously because the technique was so deeply embedded that it didn’t require conscious attention.
After the performance, I walked away from the table and had a moment of quiet astonishment. Not at the magic — at the experience of performing it. For the first time, I had been truly present. Not managing two parallel tracks of consciousness — technique and humanity — but fully inhabiting the human dimension while the technical dimension took care of itself.
That was freedom. And it was a direct result of the difficult path — the hundreds of solitary hours of practice that had pushed the technique below the surface of consciousness.
The Consulting Parallel That Clinched It
The consulting parallel is so clean that it’s almost too neat, but it’s real and it’s how I first understood this principle intellectually, before I experienced it in performance.
Early in my consulting career, I’d walk into client meetings with extensive preparation but still find myself mentally managing the mechanics. Which slide comes next? Where did I put the data point that supports this argument? How do I transition from this topic to that one? The preparation was there, but it was in my conscious mind rather than embedded below it. The result was competent but somewhat rigid. I could deliver the material, but I couldn’t dance with the room.
The senior consultants I admired most had a different quality. They’d prepared just as thoroughly — more thoroughly, actually — but their preparation had become so deeply internalized that they could forget about it in the room. They’d listen to a client’s concern, pivot from slide twelve to slide twenty-three because that’s where the relevant data lived, address the concern directly, then pivot back to the original flow — all without losing a beat. They were free in the meeting because they were imprisoned in the preparation beforehand.
One of them told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “The goal isn’t to have a plan. The goal is to have the plan so deeply in your bones that you can throw it away and respond to what’s actually happening in the room.” He paused and then added, “You can only throw away a plan you actually have.”
That’s Cassidy’s insight translated into consulting language. You can only be free in the moment when you’ve done the work beforehand. The freedom and the constraint are not opposites — they’re sequential stages of the same process. First the constraint. Then the freedom. Skip the constraint, and the freedom never arrives.
Dariel Fitzkee’s Version
Fitzkee said something similar in Showmanship for Magicians, though with a different emphasis. He wrote that when the mechanics become habitual — when they can be done subconsciously — then your entire mind is free for selling the trick to the audience. “Selling the trick is more important than doing it.”
That line hit me hard. Selling the trick is more important than doing it. The technique is necessary, yes. Without clean technique, the effect doesn’t work. But the technique is not what the audience experiences. The audience experiences the presentation — the story, the timing, the eye contact, the emotional arc, the human connection. That’s the selling. And you can only sell effectively when you’re not simultaneously managing the manufacturing.
Think about a great salesperson. Not the stereotypical pushy salesperson, but the genuinely skilled one who makes the conversation feel natural and makes you feel understood. That person isn’t thinking about her pitch structure while she’s talking to you. She’s internalized the structure so deeply that it flows naturally, allowing her full attention to be on you. The structure supports the conversation; it doesn’t drive it.
That’s what deeply practiced technique does for a performer. It supports the performance. It provides the infrastructure on which the human connection is built. But it stays in the background, invisible, doing its job without demanding attention. The performer’s attention is on the audience, where it belongs.
The Practical Test
Here’s a test I now use to evaluate whether my preparation is deep enough. During a practice session, I try running through a routine while simultaneously having a conversation. Not a real conversation — I’m usually alone in a hotel room — but an imagined one. I narrate what I’m thinking about the audience, what I’d say if someone made a comment, how I’d adjust if the energy in the room shifted.
If I can do this — if I can maintain a coherent second track of thought while the routine proceeds smoothly in my hands — then the technique is at the level where freedom is possible. If the routine breaks down the moment I divert conscious attention from it, I’m not there yet. More practice is needed. More repetition. More of the hard way.
This test isn’t original to me — it’s a natural extension of the principles I’ve absorbed from Weber, from Cassidy via Weber, and from Fitzkee. But it’s become an invaluable tool for knowing when preparation has crossed the threshold from conscious competence to unconscious automaticity. And that threshold is where the freedom lives.
Freedom as the Goal of All Practice
This reframes the entire purpose of practice for me. Practice is not punishment. Practice is not the price you pay for the privilege of performing. Practice is the process by which you earn your freedom on stage.
Every repetition in a hotel room, every solitary session running through the same routine, every hour of refinement that no audience will ever see — all of it is purchasing freedom. Freedom to be present. Freedom to connect. Freedom to respond. Freedom to perform like a human being rather than a mechanism.
The performers who look most free on stage are, almost without exception, the ones who have practiced the most. Not because practice makes them stiff and then they loosen up. Because practice pushes technique below the level of consciousness, clearing the surface for everything that makes performance alive.
That’s the insight Cassidy captured and Weber preserved. The difficult path leads to freedom. Not eventually, not as a distant reward, but as a direct and measurable consequence of the work itself. Each hour of disciplined practice expands the space available for spontaneity. Each repetition moves one more element from conscious management to automatic execution, freeing one more fraction of attention for the audience.
The path is difficult. The destination is freedom. And the irony — the beautiful, frustrating, perfectly elegant irony — is that the people who avoid the difficult path in search of freedom are the ones who never find it. They remain constrained by their own under-preparation, forever managing technique instead of connecting with people, forever too busy doing the trick to sell it.
Do the hard thing. Practice past the point of competence, past the point of proficiency, past the point of boredom, into the territory where the moves become invisible and the mind becomes clear. That’s where the freedom is. Cassidy knew it. Weber documented it. And every performer who has traveled the difficult path confirms it.
The constraint is temporary. The freedom is permanent.