The most fearless period of my magic journey lasted about eight months. It started the day I bought my first deck of cards from an online tutorial site and ended somewhere around the time I performed my first show for a real audience.
During those eight months, I was willing to try anything. I learned techniques that were clearly above my level because I did not know they were above my level. I attempted routines that required years of experience because I had no concept of how many years were required. I performed effects for friends and colleagues that were, in retrospect, nowhere near ready — and I did it without hesitation, because I did not yet understand the consequences of failure.
I was fearless not because I was brave, but because I had nothing to lose.
That period produced the fastest growth I have ever experienced. Not because I was talented — I was not — but because I was operating without the brake pedal that would later slow everything down. Every decision was a towards decision. Every session was exploratory. Every attempt was a genuine gamble, and I made those gambles freely because I had no chips on the table.
Then the chips started accumulating. I developed routines that worked. I built a set that audiences responded to. I co-founded Vulpine Creations with Adam. I started incorporating magic into my keynote speaking. I had, for the first time, something real to protect. A reputation. A set list. A performing identity that clients and audiences had come to expect.
And that is when the conservatism arrived.
The Success-Conservatism Loop
Here is a pattern I have observed in myself, in other performers I know, and in the business world I come from: the more you achieve, the more conservative you become. Not because you make a conscious decision to play it safe, but because each new achievement adds weight to the away-from side of the motivational scale.
Think of it as a seesaw. On one side is the excitement of growth — the thrill of new challenges, the possibility of reaching a higher level. On the other side is the fear of loss — the anxiety of risking what you have already built.
When you are a beginner, the growth side is heavy and the loss side is empty. The seesaw tips decisively towards risk-taking, experimentation, and bold choices.
As you accumulate achievements, the loss side gets heavier. Each new skill, each successful performance, each positive reputation adds weight. The seesaw begins to level out. Then it tips the other way. And eventually, the loss side is so heavy that it takes an extraordinary amount of potential gain to even consider a risky move.
This is the success-conservatism loop. Success generates fear of losing success, which generates conservative behavior, which generates more of the same success, which generates more fear of losing it. The loop is self-reinforcing. And it is invisible from the inside because each individual conservative decision feels rational and responsible.
Where I Saw It First
The first time I clearly saw this pattern in my own practice was about two years into my journey. I had been performing a card routine at corporate events that always worked well. It was reliable, well-tested, and audience-approved. I also had an idea for a replacement routine — something that combined card work with mentalism in a way that I found much more interesting and that better reflected where I was heading as a performer.
But the replacement routine was untested. It was more complex. It required audience interactions I had not yet practiced in front of real people. And the existing routine worked.
So I kept the existing routine.
For months.
Every time I had an opportunity to test the new piece, I chose the safe option. The reasoning was always some variation of: “Not this event. This one is too important. I will test it at a smaller gig.” But the smaller gig never came, because every gig felt important once it was on the calendar.
The success of the existing routine was the very thing preventing its replacement. And the longer I performed it, the more successful it became, and the stronger the lock grew. I was caught in the loop.
The Incumbent’s Dilemma, Revisited
In my consulting work, I have seen this pattern destroy companies. The dynamic is so common it has a name: the incumbent’s dilemma. A company innovates, achieves market success, and then gradually shifts from innovation to defense. The research division shrinks. The risk-taking decreases. The focus moves from creating new value to protecting existing revenue.
The companies that fall hardest are the ones that were once the most innovative. Their early success was built on bold decisions, but their later decline was caused by the conservative instinct that their own success created.
Kodak invented the digital camera and then buried it because it threatened their film business. Nokia dominated mobile phones and then failed to pivot to smartphones because the existing business was too profitable to risk. Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix and declined because their rental store model was still working.
Every one of these decisions was made by intelligent, experienced people who sincerely believed they were being responsible. They were not being responsible. They were being conservative. And the conservatism was a direct product of their success.
The parallel to a performing career is uncomfortably precise. You build a set that works. You establish a reputation based on that set. And then you stop developing, not because you lack ideas or ambition, but because the set works and the reputation is valuable and the risk of change feels disproportionate to the potential reward.
The 99% Theory and the Conservation Trap
The practice methodology research I studied describes something called the 99% theory: that 99% of what we think, feel, and do today is the same as what we thought, felt, and did yesterday. This is not an exaggeration — it is a neurological reality. The brain builds neural pathways through repetition, and those pathways become the default routes for all future behavior.
In practice terms, this means that once your session structure is established, it tends to self-perpetuate. The routines you practice become the routines you always practice. The difficulty level you work at becomes the difficulty level you always work at. The ratio of maintenance to growth becomes the ratio you always maintain. And each day that passes with the same structure makes the structure slightly harder to change.
When you combine the 99% theory with the success-conservatism loop, you get a powerful trap. Success raises the stakes, making conservative behavior feel more justified. The 99% theory locks that conservative behavior into a daily pattern that resists change. And loss aversion provides the emotional fuel that keeps the whole system running — a quiet, persistent anxiety about what might happen if you deviate from what works.
The result is stagnation that feels like stability. A plateau that feels like a summit. A ceiling that feels like a floor.
The Vulpine Creations Paradox
Co-founding Vulpine Creations with Adam created a particularly interesting version of this trap. On one hand, running a magic company gave me every reason to keep growing as a performer. We design and develop effects. We need to understand performance deeply. We need to be on the cutting edge of what works and what does not.
On the other hand, co-founding a company meant I now had professional stakes in my performing identity. Clients expected a certain level of polished performance. Business relationships were built on the reliability of what I delivered. The company name was attached to my performances, which meant that a bad show was not just a personal setback but a brand risk.
The professional stakes amplified the conservatism. Where a hobbyist might feel free to experiment because the cost of failure is low, I felt constrained precisely because the cost of failure was professional. A bad performance at a corporate event could affect the company, the relationship, the brand.
This is the paradox: the same success that demands continued growth also creates the conditions that inhibit it. The higher the stakes, the more you need to innovate, and the more afraid you are to try.
Adam, I should note, does not suffer from this particular problem to the same degree. He has a different relationship with risk — more instinctive, more playful, more willing to jump without a parachute and figure it out on the way down. Working with him has been one of the most effective correctives to my own conservatism. When I hesitate to try something new in performance, he pushes. When I default to the safe choice, he suggests the dangerous one. Having a creative partner whose bias profile is different from your own is enormously valuable, because they can see the conservatism you cannot.
The Question That Unlocks the Trap
The question that finally broke the success-conservatism loop for me was not “What should I do?” It was “What would I do if I had nothing to lose?”
This is a question from my consulting toolkit, one I have used with clients facing strategic decisions for years. But it took embarrassingly long for me to apply it to my own performing.
If I had nothing to lose — no reputation, no established set, no client expectations, no company brand to protect — what would I perform? What would I try? What risks would I take?
The answers came quickly. I would test the new mentalism piece at the next corporate event, not the safe card routine. I would restructure my set to reflect my current interests, not my past successes. I would experiment with audience interaction styles that I found interesting rather than defaulting to the ones I knew worked.
None of these answers were surprising. They were, in fact, the same ideas I had been deferring for months. The only thing preventing me from acting on them was the weight of what I had already achieved — weight that my brain translated into fear, and fear that my brain translated into conservative decisions.
Asking the question did not eliminate the fear. But it clarified the gap between what I was doing and what I would do in the absence of the bias. And that gap — the distance between your current conservative behavior and your bias-free behavior — is the exact measure of how much the success-conservatism loop is costing you.
The Controlled Burn
In ecology, there is a practice called a controlled burn. Forests accumulate dead undergrowth over time, and this undergrowth becomes increasingly flammable. If left unmanaged, it eventually feeds a catastrophic wildfire that destroys everything. But if you deliberately burn small sections of undergrowth in a controlled way, you clear the fuel, stimulate new growth, and make the forest healthier and more resilient.
I think of my periodic repertoire overhauls as controlled burns. Every few months, I deliberately set fire to something that is working. I retire a reliable routine and replace it with something untested. I restructure the set order. I change the opening or the closing. I introduce new material that I have been avoiding because it is risky.
It is uncomfortable every time. The loss aversion howls. The success-conservatism loop tightens. Every instinct tells me to keep what works and add to it rather than replace it.
But the alternative — the unmanaged forest, the accumulating undergrowth, the ever-increasing conservatism — leads somewhere worse. It leads to a performer who peaked years ago and does not know it, because the set still gets applause and the clients still rebook and nothing is obviously wrong. Everything is fine. Everything is safe. Everything is exactly the same as it was last year, and the year before that.
The controlled burn hurts in the short term. But it is the only thing that keeps the forest alive.
The Counterintuitive Truth
Here is what I have learned, painfully and slowly, about the relationship between achievement and risk: the more you have achieved, the more you can afford to risk. Not the less.
This is the exact opposite of what the bias tells you. The bias says: you have built something valuable, so protect it. Do not gamble with what works.
But the truth is that your accumulated achievements are a foundation, not a ceiling. The skills you have built, the reputation you have earned, the experience you have gained — these do not disappear when you try something new. They provide the safety net that makes experimentation possible.
A performer with ten years of experience and a proven repertoire can afford to test new material at a live show. If the new piece fails, the old material is still there. The audience will not forget your best work because of one imperfect debut. The safety net of your existing skill and reputation catches you.
A beginner cannot afford that risk because there is no net. Which is ironic, because beginners are the ones who take risks freely, and experienced performers are the ones who retreat into safety.
The success-conservatism loop gets the calculus exactly backwards. The people with the most to gain from risk-taking — the experienced performers with deep skill and wide safety nets — are the ones most paralyzed by the fear of loss. And the people with the least to gain — the beginners with no foundation — are the ones most willing to leap.
Recognizing this inversion will not make the fear go away. But it might make you question whether the fear is telling you the truth. And that question, asked often enough, is what keeps the conservatism from calcifying into permanence.