There’s a moment in the development of any skill where something shifts. It’s not the moment you learn the technique. It’s not the moment you can execute it reliably. It’s the moment the technique disappears.
I mean that literally. The conscious experience of performing the technique vanishes. Your hands do what they do, and your mind is somewhere else entirely. Not distracted. Not absent. Free. Available for something that was previously impossible: original thought in the middle of performance.
This is what fluency is. Not competence. Not proficiency. Fluency. The point where technique becomes so deeply embedded that it no longer registers as technique at all. It becomes as natural and unremarkable as breathing.
And it’s at that point — and only at that point — that originality becomes possible.
The Musical Analogy
I’m a musician in addition to being a magician, and I think the musical analogy is the clearest way to explain this.
A beginning pianist thinks about finger positions. Which finger goes where. The physical mechanics of producing each note. At this stage, playing a simple melody requires the pianist’s full conscious attention. There is no bandwidth for anything else — no room for interpretation, for dynamics, for personal expression. The pianist is operating a machine. Press these keys in this order at this tempo. That’s the entire cognitive task.
An intermediate pianist has automated the basic mechanics. Finger positions are no longer conscious decisions. But they’re still thinking about the music in a structural way: this chord leads to that chord, this passage needs to slow down here, the left hand needs to be quieter in this section. There’s room for interpretation, but it requires effort. The pianist is following a map.
A fluent pianist — a genuinely fluent one — is doing something qualitatively different. They’re not thinking about finger positions or chord progressions or dynamic markings. They’re hearing the music they want to create and their hands are producing it. The technique is a transparent medium between intention and sound. It doesn’t exist as a separate cognitive task. It just is.
And it’s at that level of fluency that jazz exists. Jazz musicians don’t improvise by thinking about scales and chord substitutions in real time. They’ve internalized those structures so deeply that creative expression flows through them the way water flows through a pipe. The pipe doesn’t decide where the water goes. It enables the water to flow.
You can’t create jazz by thinking about finger positions. The mechanics have to be invisible before the creativity can be visible.
The Moment It Happened for Me
I remember the first time I experienced this in magic. It was unremarkable in every external way — a private gathering in Salzburg, maybe fifteen people, a casual close-up set. I was performing a card routine I’d practiced extensively, one of the effects from my focused-practice period.
Midway through the routine, I noticed something I’d never noticed before while performing: the woman directly in front of me was leaning slightly to her left to get a better view. Her husband, standing behind her, was craning his neck. The couple to their right had unconsciously moved closer.
I noticed this because, for the first time, I was actually looking at the audience during the moments that mattered. My eyes weren’t on my hands. My attention wasn’t on the technique. I was watching the people, and they were watching me, and in between us was the effect unfolding through hands that were operating on their own.
And then something unexpected happened. I adjusted. Without conscious decision, I shifted my angle slightly to give the woman a better sightline. I slowed down a beat to let the husband lean in. I made a comment — something unscripted, something about the couple being in perfect position for what was about to happen — that made them laugh and gave the rest of the group a moment to resettle.
None of this was planned. None of it was in my script. It emerged in the moment because I had cognitive bandwidth to spare. The technique wasn’t consuming my attention, so my attention was available for the audience. And because my attention was on the audience, I could respond to what I was seeing. Creatively. Spontaneously. Originally.
That was the gateway. Not a dramatic breakthrough. A quiet opening of a door that had been locked by the demands of conscious technique and was now unlocked by the fluency that practice had produced.
Derren Brown’s Framework: Recreation vs. Repetition
Derren Brown writes about a closely related concept in Absolute Magic that deepened my understanding of what was happening. He describes the difference between repetition and recreation.
Repetition is performing an effect by running through memorized actions and memorized words. The performer is essentially pressing play on an internal recording. The technique is functional, the patter is delivered, the effect happens. But there’s a mechanical quality to it. The audience can sense — sometimes consciously, sometimes only as a vague feeling that something is off — that the performer is executing a routine rather than sharing an experience.
Recreation is something entirely different. It’s performing the effect fresh each time, as though it’s happening for the first time. The words come from genuine engagement with the specific people in front of you, not from a memorized script. The timing responds to the room’s actual energy, not to a rehearsed template. The performer is genuinely present, genuinely responsive, genuinely alive to the moment.
Brown’s actor friend Peter Clifford described the process of achieving this in theatre: you rigorously memorize your lines, and then you forget them. When you walk on stage, you don’t know what you’ll say until the words come out. Everything is said for the first time.
That sounds paradoxical — memorize, then forget — but it’s the same phenomenon I experienced in Salzburg. I had memorized every beat of the routine so thoroughly that the memorization itself became invisible. The script was there, encoded deep enough that it would emerge without being summoned. And because it didn’t need to be summoned, my conscious mind was free to engage with what was actually happening in the room. The memorized structure provided the foundation. The spontaneous responses provided the life.
This is recreation. It’s what happens when fluency is achieved. And it is the gateway to originality because it’s the gateway to genuine presence.
Why You Can’t Skip to Originality
Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier: you cannot be original without first being fluent.
I know this sounds restrictive. Creativity, we’re told, is about breaking rules, thinking differently, being spontaneous. And all of that is true — but only after the foundations are in place. The rule-breakers who create genuinely new work in any field are, almost without exception, people who first mastered the rules so thoroughly that the rules became invisible to them.
Picasso was a classically trained draftsman before he deconstructed form in Cubism. Charlie Parker had internalized every standard in the jazz canon before he reinvented how improvisation works. The originality that we celebrate in any creative field is built on a foundation of deeply internalized technique.
In magic, the same principle holds. The performers who seem most original — who seem to be creating the experience in real time, who respond to the audience with the kind of spontaneity that makes every show feel unique — are the ones who have practiced the most. Their originality isn’t despite their preparation. It’s because of it. The preparation freed them from the mechanics and allowed the creativity to flow.
The performer who tries to be original without being fluent is the musical equivalent of a beginning pianist trying to play jazz. The mechanics consume so much cognitive bandwidth that there’s nothing left for creative expression. What emerges isn’t spontaneous — it’s chaotic. Not original — just unprepared.
The Creative Ideas That Come Unbidden
Something I didn’t expect when I reached a basic level of fluency was the creative ideas that started arriving during performance. Not during practice — during performance.
Here’s what I mean. When your technique is automatic and your attention is on the audience, you start noticing things you never noticed before. You notice how a particular moment lands differently with different groups. You notice that a certain phrase gets a bigger reaction when delivered after a pause rather than before it. You notice that an effect hits harder when you make eye contact with a specific person at a specific moment.
These observations are the raw material of originality. They’re the insights that lead to genuine improvements in your performance — not improvements borrowed from a book or a tutorial, but improvements discovered through your own direct experience of performing for real people in real time.
And they only arrive when you have the cognitive bandwidth to receive them. When technique is consuming your attention, you can’t notice these things. You’re too busy operating the machinery. The observations require the kind of relaxed, open awareness that only becomes available when the mechanics are running on autopilot.
I started keeping a notebook — just a small one in my performing case — where I’d jot down observations after each set. “The reveal lands harder with a two-second pause beforehand.” “Making eye contact with the person who seems most skeptical increases the group’s reaction.” “The third line of the script gets more laughs when I deliver it with a slight shrug.”
These notes became the source of the most meaningful improvements I’ve made as a performer. Not radical changes. Tiny, specific refinements discovered through the kind of present-moment attention that fluency enables. And over time, these refinements accumulated into something that started to feel genuinely mine — not a collection of borrowed techniques and adopted presentations, but a personal performance style shaped by my own observations of my own audiences.
That’s originality. Not the dramatic, break-all-the-rules kind. The quiet, incremental, deeply personal kind that comes from paying attention to what’s actually happening in front of you. And it’s only accessible when you’re fluent enough to pay that attention.
The Ongoing Process
I want to be honest about something: fluency isn’t a destination you arrive at and then possess forever. It’s a spectrum, and I’m still moving along it.
There are aspects of my performance that have reached genuine fluency — techniques so deeply embedded that they require zero conscious attention even under pressure. And there are aspects that are still in the conscious-competence phase — things I can do well but that still require a degree of mental bandwidth that limits my freedom.
The process is ongoing. Each new level of fluency opens a new dimension of creative possibility. Each element that drops below consciousness frees a small additional increment of attention for the audience. And each increment of freed attention produces a slightly more original, slightly more present, slightly more alive performance.
This is the real argument for relentless practice. Not that it makes you more technically impressive — though it does. Not that it makes you more reliable — though it does. But that it makes you more free. More creative. More original. More you.
The technique is the gateway. The fluency is the opening. And what comes through, when the gateway is open, is whatever is uniquely yours to offer — the observations, the instincts, the creative responses that no amount of studying other performers could have given you.
That’s what Cassidy and Weber and Brown and Fitzkee were all pointing toward from their different angles. Do the hard work. Achieve the fluency. And then — only then — will you discover what you’re actually capable of when the mechanics get out of the way and the real performing begins.