There is a moment I remember vividly from a hotel room in Graz. It was late, maybe eleven at night. I was sitting at the desk with my cards spread out in front of me, and I had just spent the last ninety minutes practicing. If you had asked me how the session went, I would have told you it was solid. Ninety minutes of focused practice. Disciplined. Consistent.
But here is what actually happened during those ninety minutes: I ran through my ambitious card routine three times. I practiced my cups and balls sequence twice. I rehearsed the opening and closing of my packet tricks. I did a few flourishes to keep my fingers loose. And then I packed up, congratulated myself on a good session, and went to bed.
Every single thing I practiced that night was something I could already do.
Not a single minute was spent on anything new, anything difficult, anything that pushed me beyond where I already was. Ninety minutes of repetition at my current level, neatly packaged as discipline, consistently delivered night after night across dozens of hotel rooms and hundreds of sessions.
I did not know it at the time, but I was being controlled by one of the most powerful cognitive biases that exists in human psychology. And it was hiding in plain sight, disguised as work ethic.
The Bias That Runs the Show
In my research into how top performers practice — the kind of deep-dive study that eventually led to my own practice methodology — I came across a concept that stopped me cold. It is called the towards-and-away-from motivation bias, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The idea is straightforward. Human beings have two fundamental motivational directions. We are either moving towards something we want — a goal, an achievement, a new ability — or we are moving away from something we fear — a loss, a decline, a regression. Both directions feel like motivation. Both generate effort. Both produce the sensation of working hard.
But they produce radically different results.
The towards direction drives growth. It is the force that makes you attempt something you cannot yet do, accept the discomfort of failure, and push past your current limits. It is the engine of progress.
The away-from direction drives preservation. It is the force that makes you rehearse what you already know, protect skills you have already built, and avoid the risk of temporary decline. It is the engine of stagnation disguised as diligence.
And here is the part that changed everything for me: in the population at large, the away-from direction is dramatically more powerful than the towards direction. Most people, in most situations, are more motivated by what they might lose than by what they might gain.
How It Showed Up in My Practice
Once I understood this bias, I started reviewing my own practice sessions with different eyes. Not just what I was doing, but why I was doing it.
The results were uncomfortable.
My typical hotel room session looked like this: I would start with something I knew well, to warm up. Then I would run through routines I had been performing for months, to make sure they were still sharp. Then, if I had time and energy left, I might — might — try something new. A new technique I had seen in a tutorial. A new routine I wanted to add to my set. A new approach to an existing piece.
But by the time I got to the new material, I was tired. My focus was depleted. My hands were fatigued. And the new material was hard — it required full concentration, fresh energy, and the willingness to fail repeatedly. So more often than not, I would tell myself I would get to it tomorrow. Tonight was a good session. I got through all my routines. Everything felt solid.
I was moving away from loss, not towards gain.
The fear was not conscious. I never thought to myself, “I am afraid of losing my ambitious card routine.” It was more subtle than that. It was a quiet, background anxiety that whispered: if you do not run through your routines, they will get worse. If you do not maintain your skills, you will lose them. If you skip the fundamentals, the foundation will crack.
That whisper felt like wisdom. It felt like the voice of experience and discipline. It was, in fact, the voice of a cognitive bias exploiting my psychology to keep me exactly where I was.
The Quiet Tyranny of Maintenance
The thing about maintenance practice is that it feels productive. You are doing something. Your hands are moving. Time is passing. You can see the cards responding, feel the routines flowing, observe yourself performing at your current level. There is a tangible sense of accomplishment.
But maintenance practice, by definition, does not make you better. It keeps you the same. And if all your practice time goes to maintenance, you are not practicing — you are treading water.
Think about it through a simple analogy. If your current strength allows you to lift thirty kilograms, and every day you go to the gym and lift thirty kilograms, you are not getting stronger. You are maintaining your current strength. You feel like you are working out. You are sweating. Your muscles are engaged. But no adaptation is happening because there is no new stimulus forcing your body to grow.
The same principle applies to every skill, including magic. Your body and mind improve through adaptation — they encounter a stress that exceeds their current capability, and they respond by building capacity to handle that stress. If the stress never exceeds your current capability, no adaptation occurs.
Ninety minutes of practicing routines I could already perform was the equivalent of going to the gym and lifting the same weight I lifted last week, last month, last year. I was working hard. I was sweating. I was achieving nothing.
The Invisible Shift
What makes the towards-and-away-from bias so insidious is that it does not announce itself. There is no moment where you consciously decide to stop growing and start preserving. The shift happens gradually, incrementally, and entirely below the level of conscious awareness.
When you first start learning a skill — when I first picked up a deck of cards in that hotel room and started watching tutorials on my laptop — everything is new. Every practice session involves new material because you have no existing material to maintain. The towards direction is the only direction available.
But as you build skills, something shifts. You now have things worth protecting. You have routines that work, techniques that flow, a repertoire that audiences respond to. And the fear of losing those things begins to compete with the desire to gain new ones.
At first, the competition is mild. You still spend most of your time learning new things, with a small percentage dedicated to maintenance. But the ratio shifts. Slowly, session by session, the maintenance percentage grows. The new material percentage shrinks. And eventually, without ever making a conscious decision to stop growing, you find yourself spending ninety minutes in a hotel room running through routines you have known for months, calling it discipline, and wondering why your progress has stalled.
The bias operates like a thermostat. Once you have acquired a certain level of skill, the bias sets that level as the baseline and directs all your energy towards maintaining it. Growth, which requires risk, discomfort, and the acceptance of temporary decline, gets squeezed out by the overwhelming priority of preservation.
Why It Matters Beyond Practice
This is not just a practice problem. The towards-and-away-from bias shows up everywhere in a performer’s life.
In repertoire decisions: you keep performing the same set because it works, and the thought of replacing a proven piece with an untested one feels irresponsible. You are moving away from the risk of a weak show rather than towards the possibility of a stronger one.
In creative choices: you stick with presentation styles that are comfortable rather than experimenting with approaches that might fail. The tried-and-true script stays, not because it is the best possible version, but because changing it might make things worse.
In career decisions: you take the safe gig rather than the challenging one. You avoid the festival where other performers will see you because the stakes feel too high. You turn down the opportunity that stretches you because the comfortable bookings pay the same.
Every one of these decisions feels rational in the moment. Every one of them is driven by the same bias: the fear of loss overpowering the pursuit of gain.
The Consultant’s Perspective
My background in strategy consulting gave me a useful lens for understanding this bias, once I recognized it. In business, we see the same pattern constantly. Companies that were once innovative become conservative as they grow. The startup that took bold risks becomes the corporation that protects market share. The entrepreneur who disrupted an industry becomes the executive who avoids disruption.
The dynamic is identical. Early in the journey, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. Every decision is a towards decision. But as success accumulates, the calculus shifts. There is now something valuable to protect. The away-from direction gains strength. And gradually, imperceptibly, the organization stops innovating and starts defending.
In consulting, we call this the incumbent’s dilemma. In practice methodology, it is the towards-and-away-from bias. The mechanism is the same. The solution, as I would eventually discover, involves the same fundamental shift: consciously choosing to prioritize growth over preservation, even when every instinct tells you to protect what you have.
The First Step: Awareness
The first and most important step in overcoming any cognitive bias is recognizing that it exists. Not intellectually — most people will nod along when you describe loss aversion — but experientially. Feeling it in your own behavior. Catching yourself in the act.
After I learned about the towards-and-away-from bias, I started asking myself a simple question at the end of every practice session: What did I attempt today that I could not do yesterday?
Not what did I practice. Not how long did I practice. What did I attempt that was genuinely new, genuinely difficult, genuinely beyond my current level?
If the answer was nothing, the session was maintenance. Full stop. Regardless of how long it lasted, regardless of how many routines I ran through, regardless of how productive it felt.
That question changed everything. Not because it magically made me braver or more disciplined. But because it forced me to confront the gap between what I was doing and what I needed to be doing. It made the bias visible. And once a bias is visible, it loses much of its power.
I still do maintenance. Routines need to stay sharp. Techniques need to stay fluid. There is a legitimate place for rehearsal in any practice session. But maintenance no longer runs the session. It no longer gets the best energy, the prime position, the first ninety minutes. It has been relocated to where it belongs — a supporting role, not the headliner.
The headliner is growth. The towards direction. The thing I cannot yet do. The thing that makes me uncomfortable, that forces me to fail, that demands every ounce of concentration I have.
That is where progress lives. And it took a cognitive bias I did not even know I had to show me that I had been avoiding it for years, in the most well-disguised way imaginable: by working very, very hard at staying exactly where I was.