I have spent most of my professional life being the person in the room who knows things. That is, quite literally, the job description of a strategy consultant. You walk into a boardroom, and your value proposition is expertise. You have analyzed the data. You have studied the market. You have frameworks and models and case studies that allow you to speak with authority on subjects that other people in the room know less about.
I had been doing this for years. It was the foundation of my professional identity. And then, sometime around 2016, I bought a deck of cards from ellusionist.com and discovered what it feels like to know absolutely nothing.
Not “relatively little.” Not “less than the experts.” Absolutely nothing. I could not shuffle a deck properly. I did not know the names of basic techniques. I did not understand the terminology. I watched online tutorials and did not even understand what I was supposed to be looking at. The gap between what the person on screen was doing and what my hands were producing was not a gap — it was a canyon. An abyss.
And here is the part that surprised me: I hated it.
The Expert’s Ego
I did not expect to hate it. I expected the learning process to be fun. After all, I had chosen this. Nobody forced me to buy those cards. I was in a hotel room, alone, with no audience and no deadline. This was supposed to be recreational. A hobby to fill the long evenings on the road. Something to do with my hands.
But my ego had not been consulted. My ego, trained by fifteen years of professional authority, was completely unprepared for the experience of incompetence. Every fumbled shuffle was not just a fumbled shuffle — it was an assault on my self-image. Every dropped card was evidence that I was bad at something. Every failed attempt at a basic technique was a small humiliation, experienced alone in a hotel room with nobody watching, and yet somehow more embarrassing than any professional failure I had ever experienced in front of a client.
The reason, I would later understand, was that professional failures happen within a domain where I have competence. If a presentation goes poorly, I still know that I am a capable consultant who had a bad day. The failure is an event within a larger context of ability.
But magic was different. In magic, there was no larger context of ability. I had no ability. The failure was not an event within a context — it was the entire context. I was not a competent person having a bad moment. I was an incompetent person having a normal moment. And that distinction, for someone whose identity was built on competence, was devastating.
The Pretending Phase
For the first few months, I dealt with this in the worst possible way. I pretended I was not at zero.
I told myself I had transferable skills. My analytical mind would give me an edge. My experience with strategy and systems thinking would accelerate my learning. My familiarity with performance from business presentations would translate to magical performance. I was not really starting from zero — I was starting from a different kind of expertise that would convert into magical skill more quickly than someone without my background.
This story was comfortable. It was also completely false.
My analytical mind did not help me shuffle cards. My systems thinking did not make my fingers more dexterous. My presentation experience did not teach me how to manage a spectator’s attention while my hands were doing something they were not supposed to see. The skills I had from my professional life were real skills, but they lived in a completely different domain, and pretending they transferred to magic was a way of avoiding the raw, uncomfortable truth.
I was at zero.
And the pretending phase — the months I spent telling myself I had advantages, I was ahead of the curve, I was a fast learner, I had a head start — was actually making me worse. Not because positive self-talk is bad. Because the pretending was distorting my assessment of where I actually was, which was distorting the kind of practice I was doing, which was slowing my progress to a crawl.
The Distortion Effect
Here is how pretending not to be at zero actually damages your learning. When you believe you have some baseline of ability, you skip fundamentals. You rush past the boring basics because you think they are beneath your actual level. You attempt intermediate material because that is where someone with your “transferable skills” should be working. And you practice at a level that is above your true capability but below the level where productive struggle happens, which is the dead zone of learning — the zone where you are not easy enough to build confidence and not hard enough to trigger adaptation.
I did this for months. I skipped basic card handling exercises because they felt remedial. I jumped to intermediate techniques because they seemed more appropriate for someone with my intelligence and analytical background. And I wondered why nothing was sticking.
The answer was obvious, once I was willing to see it. I had built my practice on a false assessment of my starting point. I was constructing a building on a foundation that did not exist, because I was too proud to admit that the foundation had not been laid yet.
The Moment It Broke
The realization came, as these things often do, through someone else’s words. I was reading about the concept of beginner’s mind — the Zen Buddhist idea of approaching a subject with openness, eagerness, and the absence of preconceptions. The idea that the expert’s mind sees few possibilities because it is full of assumptions, while the beginner’s mind sees many possibilities because it is empty.
I had encountered this concept before in my professional life. I had even recommended it to clients. “Approach this market with beginner’s mind,” I would say, with full consultant gravitas. “Set aside your assumptions. Look at it with fresh eyes.”
And there I was, in my own hotel room, refusing to apply the very principle I had been selling to boardrooms for years. I was the client who could not take his own consultant’s advice.
The moment I acknowledged this — really acknowledged it, not intellectually but emotionally, felt it in my chest — something shifted. Not gradually. Immediately.
I was at zero. Truly, honestly, without qualification or consolation, at zero. I did not know how to handle a deck of cards properly. I did not understand the basic principles of misdirection. I did not have a foundation in sleight of hand, in performance, in audience management, in any of the hundred sub-skills that magic requires. I was a forty-something strategy consultant sitting alone in a hotel room with a deck of cards, and I knew absolutely nothing about what I was trying to do.
And the moment I admitted that, a weight lifted.
Why Zero Is Freedom
The liberation of zero, once you stop fighting it, is extraordinary.
At zero, you have no reputation to protect. There is no one watching you fail. There is no standard you are falling short of. There is no level you are supposed to be at. Every single thing you learn — every technique, every concept, every principle — is pure gain. You cannot go backwards from zero. You can only go forward.
At zero, you have no bad habits. You have not yet learned the wrong way to do things. You have not ingrained mistakes that will need to be painfully unlearned later. You are a blank page. Everything you write on that page is new.
At zero, you have no blind spots created by partial knowledge. The most dangerous position in any skill is knowing enough to think you understand but not enough to actually understand. At zero, you know you do not understand. And that knowledge — the clear-eyed awareness of your own ignorance — is the most powerful foundation for learning that exists.
My consulting background, ironically, confirmed this. The clients who learned fastest were not the ones with the most prior experience in a new domain. They were the ones who were most willing to admit they had no prior experience. The ones who said “I know nothing about this market, teach me everything” progressed faster than the ones who said “I know a lot about adjacent markets, so I should be able to pick this up quickly.” The first group built from an accurate foundation. The second group built from a distorted one.
Starting Over, Properly
After the realization, I went back to the beginning. Literally. I pulled up the most basic card handling tutorials I could find — the ones I had skipped months earlier because they felt beneath me — and I started from the first lesson.
It was humbling. The techniques were simple. The exercises were elementary. And they were exactly what I needed.
Within two weeks of working on genuine fundamentals — exercises I had dismissed as too basic — I noticed something remarkable. The intermediate techniques I had been struggling with for months started to click. Not because I was working on them directly, but because the foundation I was finally building supported them. The basic handling I had skipped was the invisible infrastructure that everything else depended on. Without it, nothing above it could stabilize.
Three weeks of proper fundamental work did more for my intermediate skills than three months of trying to practice intermediate material on a nonexistent foundation.
The Adult Advantage, Redefined
Here is the twist that I did not expect. Once I stopped pretending my professional background gave me a head start in card handling, I discovered that it actually gave me a head start — just not where I thought.
My analytical mind did not help me shuffle. But it helped me design a practice system. My strategic thinking did not make my fingers faster. But it helped me identify which skills to prioritize and in what sequence. My experience with frameworks and models did not translate to sleight of hand. But it helped me understand the architecture of learning itself — how skills stack, where the leverage points are, what to focus on when everything seems equally difficult.
The adult advantage was not in the doing. It was in the organizing. And that advantage only became accessible once I stopped using it as an excuse to skip the doing.
This is the distinction that took me months to learn. Having a structured approach to learning is enormously valuable. But the structure only works if you are honest about where you are within it. A brilliant practice system built on a false assessment of your current level is worse than a mediocre practice system built on an accurate one.
What Zero Taught Me About Everything Else
The willingness to start from zero did not stay confined to magic. Once I experienced the liberation of admitting complete ignorance in one domain, I started applying it elsewhere. In business conversations where I had always pretended to understand things I did not fully understand. In social situations where I had always projected competence I did not feel. In new areas of learning where I had always looked for shortcuts based on prior knowledge.
Zero, I discovered, is not a position of weakness. It is a position of honesty. And honesty, in learning as in business, is the only foundation that does not crack under pressure.
When I eventually met Adam Wilber and we began building Vulpine Creations together, I brought this principle with me. Every new challenge — product design, manufacturing, marketing to magicians, performing at conventions — I approached with the same starting acknowledgment: I am at zero with this. Teach me everything. Assume I know nothing.
It felt vulnerable every single time. And it accelerated my learning every single time.
The Question That Changed My Approach
The question I ask myself now, whenever I encounter a new challenge, is deceptively simple: Am I at zero here? Not “Am I close to zero?” Not “Am I at zero but with some transferable advantages?” Just: Am I at zero?
If the answer is yes, I say so. Out loud, if there is someone to say it to. Silently, if I am alone. The act of saying it — “I am at zero” — disarms the ego just enough to let real learning begin.
It is still uncomfortable. The expert in me still flinches. After years of being paid for what I know, admitting what I do not know still feels like a small professional death.
But that small death is the price of admission to a new domain. And on the other side of it, every time, is the exhilarating freedom of a blank page with nothing on it but possibility.
Zero is not where you are stuck. Zero is where you start. And starting, once you accept it fully, is the most powerful position there is.