This is the thousandth post.
I did not know, when I started, that there would be a thousandth post. I did not know, honestly, that there would be a second one. I started writing because I had things to think through, and writing turned out to be the best way to think them through. One post became ten, became a hundred, became a way of tracking a journey that was already happening whether or not I wrote about it.
So here we are. Post one thousand. And I want to tell you how it started, and where it went, and what the last and most important thing I learned turned out to be.
The Beginning
The beginning was not dramatic. It was a hotel room. It was, if I am being exact, one of dozens of identical hotel rooms in identical business hotels in cities I can no longer individually recall. Vienna, probably. Or somewhere else. The specific city does not matter. What matters is the structure of the situation: alone, traveling for work, another evening without anything that needed doing.
I bought a deck of cards from ellusionist.com. Not because I had a plan. Because I had a problem — the music I loved could not come with me on the road, and I needed something to do with my hands — and a deck of cards was a solution to the problem.
This is not a heroic origin story. There was no vision. No moment of calling. No recognition that I had found my thing. There was boredom and a modest purchase and the beginning of something I could not yet name.
I should also say something about where I started from. I had a bad childhood experience with a clown performer in Austria that gave me, for years, a reflexive skepticism about magic as an art form. I thought it was for children, or for people who wanted to seem mysterious at parties. I thought it was not serious.
The rediscovery of magic — going deep into the history, the documentation, the wall paintings at Beni Hassan depicting what may be the oldest conjuring performance on record, the Roman cups and balls of Seneca’s era, the medieval records, the unbroken tradition of human beings creating wonder for other human beings across four thousand years — that rediscovery changed what I was skeptical of. Not magic. Myself. For not having looked more carefully.
The Rabbit Hole
Once I started, I did not stop. The hotel rooms turned into a workshop. The deck of cards turned into a library. Michael Ammar’s cups and balls. Pop Haydn’s shell game. The silk to egg. One technique suggested another. One book suggested ten more. One understanding of the psychology of perception opened onto six more questions about how attention and belief and the construction of experience actually worked.
I studied magic the way I studied business problems: systematically, with annotation, with the intention of understanding not just what worked but why. The consulting training was not, as I initially feared, a poor fit for the craft. It turned out to be a near-perfect fit for the analytical dimension of the craft. Sleight of hand required something different — required the body to learn things the mind cannot simply decide — but effect design, presentation structure, audience psychology: these were problems I already knew how to approach.
The hotel rooms became the place where both dimensions of the work happened. The technical practice with the cards. And the thinking about what the practice was for.
The Showing
Before there was any formal performing — before Vulpine, before keynotes, before any stage — there was the informal phase that I think does not get enough credit in accounts of how performers develop.
I showed things to people. Not performing. Just showing. A colleague in a meeting who arrived early. A friend over dinner who asked what I had been spending my evenings on. A stranger at an event who happened to be standing nearby when I had a deck in my pocket.
These interactions were not performances in any professional sense. They were exchanges. I showed something. Something happened on the face of the person watching. We were both surprised by it — sometimes them by the effect, and me by my own ability to produce it.
The showing was where I first understood what this was about. Not the technique. Not the historical tradition. The face. The moment on someone’s face when something they know is impossible appears to happen and their analytical machinery pauses and something more immediate and less defended is briefly visible.
That moment. That is what this is about.
Meeting Adam
I invited Adam Wilber to Xcite Festival in London as a keynote speaker. I was hosting the event. We got on well, in the way that two people who share a genuine obsession with a particular set of questions tend to get on, immediately and without much preamble.
Adam is one of the best performers I have encountered, and he is also one of the clearest thinkers about magic that I know. Not in an academic way. In the way that someone who has done something seriously for a long time develops a language for it that is precise without being academic.
We founded Vulpine Creations together. The founding meant I needed to take the performance side of my development more seriously than I had been. You cannot run a magic company and not be able to perform. This sounds like a business pressure producing a craft outcome, and it was, in a narrow sense. But the performing capability I built in the years after the founding was built on the foundation that the hotel rooms had already created. The pressure accelerated the public dimension of something that had been developing privately for years.
The First Real Show
The first show I put together — the actual structured performance, for an audience that came knowing they were about to see something — was terrifying in the specific way I have written about in this blog. Not the nervousness of a professional speaking to colleagues. Something more animal. The dread of visible failure in front of real people.
The show was imperfect. The early versions were rough in ways I could see and in ways I probably could not see yet. I was managing my own technical execution and trying simultaneously to be present to the audience’s experience, and these two things were in competition with each other in ways that took years to resolve.
But something happened in that show that I had not expected. Something that surprised me even then and that I have never entirely gotten over.
A moment in the performance — I will not describe which one or how it worked, but it was a piece of mentalism — landed. I mean it landed in the way that good effects land: the room went quiet, and then something happened on the faces of the people watching that was unmistakable. They were not analyzing. They were experiencing. For a few seconds, the thing that I had been working toward in hotel rooms across a year of preparation was actually there, in the room, real.
I do not know how to describe the experience of producing that in other people. It is different from the satisfaction of solving a business problem well, or from the pleasure of having a difficult technical practice session go cleanly, or from any other professional accomplishment I can compare it to. It is its own category. Something about standing in front of real people and being the immediate cause of that flicker — that moment of genuine astonishment — is not reducible to anything else.
I have been chasing that moment ever since. Not in a desperate way. In the way that you pursue something you are genuinely committed to and that has not yet revealed everything it has to show you.
The Books
This blog has been, among other things, a reading journal. Thirty-one books on the shelf that defined the intellectual terrain of the journey. Stanislavski on acting. Dweck on mindset. Rilke on patience and solitude. Carson on wonder. Gilbert on memory and happiness. Martin on the long apprenticeship. Newport on skill and meaning. Darwin Ortiz on strong magic. Derren Brown on the philosophy of the craft. Tommy Wonder on the inside approach. Pete McCabe on scripting. Matthew Dicks on storytelling. Keith Johnstone on status and improvisation. And dozens more.
None of them were about magic in isolation. The best ones were about the fundamental questions of how human beings attend to experience, construct meaning, develop capability, and create something genuine in front of other people. Magic turned out to be a lens through which all of these questions could be examined with unusual clarity.
I did not expect the craft to take me this deep into the literature of psychology and philosophy and storytelling and cognitive science. But the craft, followed seriously, always leads somewhere deeper than it appears to lead from the entrance.
What Newport Got Right
Cal Newport’s argument — that passion follows mastery rather than preceding it — is the last thing I will write about in this blog, and it is also, in retrospect, the most accurate description of what happened to me.
I did not start with passion for magic. I have been honest about this throughout. I started with curiosity, with boredom, with a problem that needed a solution, with the intellectual engagement of a consulting brain encountering a genuinely complex set of problems. These things sustained the early practice when the practice was producing little that anyone else could see.
At some point — and I cannot tell you exactly when, because it happened gradually rather than suddenly — what I was doing became something I was passionate about. Not as a career pivot, not as an abandonment of the professional life that was already there, but as a genuine fire in the work. The questions got bigger. The craft got more interesting rather than more familiar as the capability developed. The audience moments got more meaningful rather than more routine.
Newport’s prediction held. The passion arrived as a consequence of depth, not as the premise of it.
But here is what Newport’s framework does not quite capture, and what I want to put on record in this last post: the passion is not separable from the specific journey that produced it. It is not a general experience of being good at something difficult. It is passion for this specific thing, shaped by the specific path through it.
The hotel rooms matter. The history matters. The clown in Austria matters, because the skepticism that he produced made the rediscovery more surprising and the commitment more deliberate. The books matter. Adam matters. Vulpine matters. The first show matters. The failed show matters. Every moment in the showing-people phase matters, and every difficult practice session, and every audience face that revealed for a fraction of a second the thing that all of this is for.
The Continuing Journey
I am not done. The craft is not fully learned. The questions are not answered. The performances are not at the level they will eventually reach — I say this not as false modesty but as honest assessment of where the development currently is and where it has not yet arrived.
There are effects I am working on that are not ready for performance. There are areas of craft where I can see the gap between where I am and where I want to be. There are questions about the relationship between magic and meaning that I have been circling for years without yet arriving at the precise articulation.
The journey continues. A thousand posts is a milestone, not a destination.
But this is also true: after nine years in hotel rooms and on stages and in conversations with an ever-expanding library of thinkers about this craft and what it is and why it matters, I know something I did not know at the beginning.
I know why human beings have been doing this for four thousand years. I know why the wall paintings at Beni Hassan depict a man performing the cups and balls for a crowd, two millennia before the common era. I know why Seneca mentioned it, why the medieval manuscripts recorded it, why every generation has had its performers and every culture has had its wonder-workers.
Because the moment on the face — the flicker, the astonishment, the brief suspension of the analytical machinery that normally manages our experience of the world — that moment is genuinely valuable. Not as entertainment, though it is entertainment. Not as puzzle, though it engages the mind. As an experience of genuine wonder in a world that systematically trains wonder out of adults.
Magic is one of the few things that can restore it. Temporarily, incompletely, in a room with one other person or in a theatre with five hundred, with the full technical apparatus of a stage production or with nothing but a deck of cards on a table — the moment happens or it does not, and when it does, something that was dormant briefly wakes up.
I have spent nine years learning to produce that moment. I will spend the rest of however much time is available continuing to learn to produce it better.
The Last Image
Late at night. A hotel room. Generic and interchangeable, the way all business hotel rooms are interchangeable. A city outside the window that may be Vienna or somewhere else — somewhere I am not from, somewhere I will leave in the morning.
A deck of cards on the desk.
The laptop open, some instructional material or some book or some half-finished thinking about how an effect should be redesigned.
The consultant who is also a magician, who is also a student of attention and wonder and the strange old tradition of making impossible things appear to happen, sitting alone in a room and doing the work that nobody can see yet, that will eventually — slowly, imperfectly, in the honest and unglamorous way that real development actually works — produce something worth watching.
That is where it started. That is still where a significant part of it happens.
The hotel room was never the obstacle.
It was always the workshop.
And in the quiet of the workshop, with the cards in your hands and the questions alive in your mind and the full weight of a four-thousand-year tradition of human wonder-making at your back — there is nothing else you would rather be doing.
That is what passion feels like when it arrives after mastery. Not a feeling that precedes the work. A feeling that the work itself becomes.
Thank you for reading.
The journey continues.