The first magic convention I attended was an education in more ways than I expected.
I went expecting to learn new techniques, discover new effects, and absorb wisdom from experienced performers. I did all of those things. But the most important thing I learned had nothing to do with magic. It had to do with conformity.
What struck me, watching performers practice in the hallways and common areas between sessions, was how similar their practice looked. Not the specific material — that varied. But the approach, the structure, the underlying methodology was remarkably uniform. They warmed up with familiar material. They ran through their routines. They occasionally tried something new that they had just seen in a lecture, fumbled with it for a few minutes, and then went back to what they knew.
The warm-up, the maintenance, the brief flirtation with the new, the retreat to the familiar. Over and over, from performer after performer, regardless of their experience level, their specialty, or their goals. The same practice pattern, replicated across dozens of people who had never coordinated their approach.
At the time, I thought this was just what practice looked like. Everyone does it this way because this is the way it is done.
Later, studying practice methodology and the cognitive biases that shape learning behavior, I would discover that everyone does it this way not because it is effective, but because humans are hardwired to do what other humans do. And this particular form of collective behavior has a name: social proof bias, or more colloquially, herd mentality.
The Safety of the Herd
Social proof is one of the most powerful influence mechanisms in human psychology. When we are uncertain about the correct behavior in a situation, we look to others for guidance. If everyone else is doing something a particular way, we assume that way is correct. The reasoning, usually unconscious, goes something like this: all these people cannot be wrong. If this is how experienced performers practice, this must be how practice should be done.
The problem is that all these people can, in fact, be wrong. And in the case of practice methodology, they usually are.
The research on deliberate practice — the kind of practice that actually produces improvement — consistently shows that most people’s practice habits are suboptimal. Not slightly suboptimal. Dramatically suboptimal. The average musician, athlete, or performer spends the vast majority of their practice time on activities that maintain their current level rather than activities that push them beyond it.
But here is the critical point: because most people practice this way, it looks normal. It looks correct. And when someone new comes along and observes the community’s practice habits, they adopt those same habits because social proof tells them that the community knows what it is doing.
The herd is not heading towards excellence. The herd is heading towards the center of the bell curve. And if you follow the herd, that is exactly where you will end up.
My Own Herd Behavior
I wish I could say I recognized this pattern immediately. I did not. I was part of the herd for longer than I care to admit.
When I started learning magic, I watched tutorials obsessively. Not just to learn the techniques, but to learn how to practice. And the tutorials, almost without exception, demonstrated a particular approach: learn the move, practice it slowly, gradually increase speed, then integrate it into a routine.
This is sound enough as a starting point. But what it created was a practice model that I adopted wholesale and never questioned. My sessions were structured around the tutorial model: learn, slow practice, speed up, integrate. Warm up with what you know. Work on new material in the middle. End with something comfortable.
I practiced this way because every tutorial I watched modeled this approach. Every performer I observed in person seemed to follow the same structure. Every forum discussion about practice habits described something similar. The consensus was overwhelming.
It was also overwhelmingly mediocre.
The breakthrough came when I started studying how naturals — the top performers in any field — actually spend their practice time. Not how they describe their practice, which is unreliable because most people cannot accurately report their own habits. How they actually practice when observed.
What I found in the research was that the top performers consistently deviated from the herd in specific, counterintuitive ways. They spent more time on material they could not yet do and less on material they could. They started sessions with the hardest work, not the easiest. They embraced failure and discomfort as signals of productive practice rather than signs that something was wrong. They structured their sessions around challenge rather than comfort.
The herd was practicing one way. The outliers were practicing a different way. And the herd was producing average results while the outliers were producing exceptional ones.
This was not a coincidence.
Why We Conform
Understanding why herd behavior is so powerful requires understanding what it protects against: the terror of being wrong alone.
If you practice the way everyone else practices and your results are mediocre, you are in good company. You can look around at all the other people getting similar results and conclude that this is just how it is. Magic is hard. Progress is slow. Some people have more talent. The mediocre results are not your fault — they are just the nature of the craft.
But if you break from the herd and practice in a radically different way, you lose that safety net. If your results are mediocre, you have no one to blame but yourself and your weird methodology. The social cover disappears. You are exposed.
This is a terrifying prospect for most people, and it operates almost entirely below the level of conscious awareness. You do not think to yourself, “I will practice like everyone else so that I have someone to blame if things go poorly.” You just feel uncomfortable doing things differently. You feel a vague sense that the unconventional approach is probably wrong. You feel drawn back to the consensus.
That feeling is social proof doing its job. It evolved to keep our ancestors safe in groups. If everyone in the tribe is walking east and you are walking west, you are probably making a mistake. In prehistoric environments, conformity to group behavior was a survival strategy.
In a hotel room in Klagenfurt trying to learn a new card technique, conformity to group practice habits is a stagnation strategy.
The Convention Effect
Magic conventions amplify the herd effect enormously. You spend three or four days surrounded by hundreds of performers, all of whom are demonstrating, discussing, and implicitly endorsing a particular set of practices and priorities. The signal is overwhelming: this is how we do things.
At my first convention, I noticed something specific that stayed with me. Performers who had just attended a lecture on a new technique would immediately try it in the hallway. They would fumble through it a few times, compare their attempts with the people around them, and then one of two things would happen.
If their attempt looked similar to everyone else’s attempt, they would continue. Social proof confirmed they were on the right track.
If their attempt looked different — even if the difference was potentially an improvement — they would adjust to match the group. Social proof told them they were doing it wrong, even when they might have been doing it better.
I watched this pattern repeat across dozens of interactions. The group was self-correcting, not towards excellence, but towards the mean. Anyone who deviated from the average was pulled back towards it by the gravitational force of social comparison.
This is how herd mentality keeps everyone average. Not by preventing improvement, but by defining the acceptable range of improvement and discouraging anything beyond it.
The Practice Room Echo Chamber
The herd effect extends beyond physical gatherings into the digital world. Online forums, social media groups, YouTube tutorials, and magic-specific communities create echo chambers where practice advice is recycled endlessly.
The advice is not bad, exactly. It is just average. It represents the consensus view of how practice should work, and the consensus view is by definition the view that produces average results. Exceptional results require exceptional methods, and exceptional methods look wrong from the perspective of the consensus.
When I started implementing the practice methodology I had studied — starting with the hardest material, prioritizing growth over maintenance, measuring progress by discomfort rather than comfort — the feedback from the community was almost universally negative.
“You are going to burn out.”
“You need to build a strong foundation before you push ahead.”
“That is not how anyone I know practices.”
That last objection is the purest expression of social proof I have ever heard. It is not an argument about effectiveness. It is an argument about conformity. I do not do it that way. Nobody I know does it that way. Therefore it must be wrong.
The fact that “nobody I know” was producing exceptional results did not enter the equation. The herd was comfortable, and comfort was the metric.
The Courage of the Outlier
In my consulting work, the companies that achieve breakthrough results are almost never the ones following industry best practices. They are the ones who identified where best practices were actually consensus practices — where the industry was doing something a particular way not because it was optimal but because everyone else was doing it — and deviated deliberately.
This requires courage, because deviating from the consensus means absorbing criticism, doubt, and the constant anxiety that you might be wrong. The herd provides emotional safety. Leaving it provides nothing but uncertainty and the distant possibility that the uncertainty will eventually pay off.
I experienced this anxiety personally when I restructured my practice sessions to put growth work first. For weeks, every session felt wrong. I was struggling with difficult material while my fingers were cold and my mind was not yet focused. The warm-up — the comfortable, community-approved way to start a session — was calling to me. Every instinct said I was making a mistake.
But the research was clear. Elite performers across disciplines consistently started with the most challenging work when their energy and focus were highest. They saved the easy, maintenance-type work for later in the session when cognitive resources were depleted. This is the opposite of the community consensus, which says warm up first, then challenge yourself.
It took about a month for the new approach to start showing results. During that month, I questioned it constantly. Not because of evidence — there was no evidence it was not working, only the discomfort of doing something different. The questioning was social proof withdrawal. I was doing something nobody else in my immediate circle was doing, and the absence of social validation felt like a warning sign.
It was not a warning sign. It was a leading indicator of divergence from the average. And divergence from the average was exactly what I was after.
How to Recognize Herd Behavior in Your Own Practice
The challenge with herd mentality is that it feels like independent decision-making. You do not experience yourself as following the crowd. You experience yourself as making reasonable choices based on available information.
Here are the questions I now ask myself to check for herd behavior in my practice decisions.
First: Where did this practice habit come from? If the answer is “I saw other people doing it” or “this is how it is normally done,” that is a social proof flag. It does not mean the habit is wrong. It means the habit was adopted without independent evaluation.
Second: What would an outsider with no knowledge of magic community norms suggest? This is a powerful thought experiment because it strips away the social proof. An outsider would look at your practice purely in terms of what is producing results, unclouded by community conventions.
Third: Am I doing this because it works or because it is comfortable? Herd behavior feels comfortable because it aligns with the group. Outlier behavior feels uncomfortable because it does not. Comfort is not evidence of effectiveness. It is evidence of conformity.
Fourth: What would happen if I did the opposite? This is the question that scares the herd behavior out of hiding. If the thought of doing the opposite makes you anxious, ask yourself whether the anxiety is based on evidence or on the discomfort of deviation.
The Price of Conformity
I want to be clear about what is at stake here. Herd mentality in practice does not make you bad. It makes you average. And for many people, average is perfectly acceptable. Not everyone needs to be exceptional. Not everyone wants to be exceptional. If your goal is to enjoy magic as a hobby and perform at a competent level for friends and family, following the community consensus will get you there.
But if your goal is to push beyond competence — to develop a level of skill that surprises yourself, to create performances that genuinely move people, to evolve as a performer rather than plateau — then the community consensus is not your friend. It is a gravitational force pulling you towards the center of the distribution, where the vast majority of performers spend their entire careers.
Breaking free of that gravity requires doing things differently. Not randomly differently — that is just chaos. Deliberately differently, based on the evidence of what actually produces exceptional results rather than the consensus of what most people happen to do.
The herd will tell you that you are doing it wrong. The herd will express concern, offer alternative approaches, and subtly pressure you to return to the fold. The herd means well. The herd is trying to protect you.
The herd is also the reason most performers, despite years of dedicated practice, never significantly exceed the level they reached after their first year or two of serious study.
The outliers do.
And the outliers all have one thing in common: at some point, they stopped following the herd and started following the evidence. That decision felt dangerous. It felt isolating. It felt wrong.
It was the most important practice decision they ever made.