For the first eighteen months of my magic journey, practice felt like work. Not work in the satisfying sense. Work in the grinding, obligatory, put-in-the-hours sense. I would sit down at the hotel desk, pull out my cards, set a timer, and force myself through my session with the same grim determination I brought to a difficult client project. The mindset was: this is hard, it is supposed to be hard, push through the discomfort, and the results will come.
The results did come. Slowly. Grudgingly. Like extracting water from stone. Each small improvement felt earned in the most effortful sense of the word — wrested from the universe through sheer discipline and willpower. I was getting better, but the trajectory felt unsustainable. The effort-to-progress ratio was brutal. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a question was forming that I did not yet have the courage to ask: does learning always have to feel like this?
I did not find the answer in a magic book. I found it in Ali Abdaal’s work on productivity and the psychology of performance, where I encountered a concept from researcher Barbara Fredrickson that changed my entire relationship with practice.
The concept is called Broaden and Build. And it suggests that the grim, discipline-first, push-through-the-pain approach to learning is not just unpleasant — it is neurologically backwards.
The Theory That Upended My Assumptions
Broaden and Build is a theory about what positive emotions actually do in the brain. Not what they feel like, or whether they are “nice to have,” but what they functionally accomplish at a cognitive level.
The theory says this: positive emotions — joy, curiosity, playfulness, interest, amusement — literally broaden your cognitive resources. When you are in a positive emotional state, your attention widens. Your peripheral vision improves. Your ability to make creative connections increases. Your willingness to experiment goes up. Your capacity to absorb new information expands.
Negative emotions — stress, anxiety, frustration, boredom — do the opposite. They narrow your focus. They constrain your attention to the immediate threat. They reduce your ability to see creative solutions. They make you rigid, repetitive, and conservative.
This is not motivational fluff. This is peer-reviewed psychology. The Broaden and Build theory is supported by decades of research into how emotional states shape cognitive function. And its implications for practice are devastating.
Because here is what I was doing: I was approaching every practice session in a state of grim discipline. Jaw set. Timer running. Frustration mounting with every failed attempt. Stress accumulating with every missed technique. I was practicing in exactly the emotional state that narrows cognitive resources, reduces creative flexibility, and constrains the ability to absorb new information.
I was trying to learn while systematically shutting down the brain systems that enable learning.
The Undoing Hypothesis
There is a companion concept that made the picture even clearer. It is called the Undoing Hypothesis, and it says that positive emotions do not just broaden cognition — they actively reverse the physiological effects of negative emotions. Joy undoes anxiety. Curiosity undoes frustration. Playfulness undoes stress.
This is not metaphorical. When you experience a negative emotion, your body responds with measurable physiological changes: increased heart rate, elevated cortisol, constricted blood vessels, shallow breathing. These responses are useful in genuine emergencies. They are catastrophic for learning. The stress response diverts resources away from the prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for complex motor learning, creative problem-solving, and the integration of new skills — and redirects them to the amygdala, which is optimized for fight-or-flight, not for mastering a new card technique.
Positive emotions reverse this cascade. They lower cortisol. They open blood vessels. They deepen breathing. They return resources to the prefrontal cortex. They literally undo the physiological state that was preventing you from learning effectively.
Every frustrated practice session I had endured — every night where I gritted my teeth through failed attempts, where I pushed through mounting stress, where I treated discomfort as evidence that I was working hard — had been working against its own purpose. The stress I was generating to fuel my discipline was actively inhibiting the neurological processes that produce skill acquisition.
The Feynman Moment
There is a story about the physicist Richard Feynman that illustrates this perfectly. Feynman, one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, went through a period where his work had stalled. He was trying to force breakthroughs through discipline and effort, and nothing was coming. Physics had become a grind.
Then he made a decision that his colleagues thought was frivolous. He stopped trying to force it. He started playing. He watched a plate spinning in a cafeteria and, just for fun, began working out the wobble equations. Not because they were important. Not because they advanced his research. Because they were interesting. Because they sparked curiosity.
The wobble equations led to a chain of playful investigations that eventually contributed to the work that won him the Nobel Prize. Feynman’s breakthrough came not from pushing harder but from lightening up. The play opened cognitive pathways that discipline had sealed shut.
When I read this, something clicked. Not intellectually — I had understood the principle intellectually for paragraphs already. Something clicked emotionally. I recognized myself in the pre-breakthrough Feynman. The grim physicist forcing his way through problems. The strategy consultant grinding through practice sessions with a set jaw and a running timer.
The Experiment
I decided to test the theory. Not as a permanent change — I was still too attached to the discipline model for that — but as an experiment. One week. Seven practice sessions. The only rule: the session must be enjoyable.
Not productive. Not efficient. Not pushing to the edge of failure. Enjoyable.
This required some rethinking. What did I actually enjoy about magic? When I stripped away the obligation, the timer, the performance goals, and the grim determination to improve — what was actually fun?
The answer surprised me. I enjoyed exploring. I enjoyed picking up a new tutorial that looked interesting and just playing with it, with no intention of adding it to my repertoire. I enjoyed the feel of the cards in my hands when I was not trying to make them do anything specific. I enjoyed attempting ridiculous things that were way beyond my skill level, not with the goal of mastering them, but with the goal of seeing what would happen.
So that is what I did. For one week, I practiced with no agenda. I followed my curiosity. If a technique interested me, I worked on it. If it stopped being interesting, I put it down and picked up something else. I did not time my sessions. I did not track my progress. I did not record anything.
What Happened
Three things happened during that week that I did not expect.
First, my sessions got longer. Not because I was disciplining myself to sit at the desk for ninety minutes. Because I lost track of time. The first night, I sat down at nine-thirty and looked up at midnight, genuinely surprised that two and a half hours had passed. Under the discipline model, ninety minutes felt like an endurance test. Under the enjoyment model, two and a half hours felt like twenty minutes.
Second, my willingness to fail increased dramatically. Under the discipline model, failure was a cost. Every failed attempt was evidence that the session was not going well. Under the enjoyment model, failure was irrelevant. I was not trying to succeed at anything specific. I was playing. And in play, failure is just information. It has no emotional weight.
Third — and this is the one that stunned me — I made more visible progress in that one week than I had in the previous three weeks of disciplined practice. Techniques that had been stuck for days suddenly unstuck. Sequences that had felt clumsy and forced began to flow. The overall quality of my card handling improved noticeably, measured not by my own subjective assessment but by recordings I compared to the previous week.
More progress. In less structured, less disciplined, less effortful practice. While having more fun.
Broaden and Build was not theoretical. It was measurable.
The False Binary
The discovery did not mean I threw discipline out the window. That is the false binary that trips people up when they encounter this idea. They hear “feeling good comes before getting good” and translate it as “stop working hard and just have fun.” That is not the principle.
The principle is about the order of operations. You do not need to choose between discipline and enjoyment. You need to lead with enjoyment and let discipline follow.
When I enjoy my practice — when I am genuinely curious, genuinely engaged, genuinely playful — discipline emerges naturally. I do not have to force myself to sit at the desk. I want to be there. I do not have to push myself through difficult material. The difficulty becomes part of the game. I do not have to will myself to practice for long sessions. The sessions extend themselves.
Discipline that grows from enjoyment is sustainable. Discipline that overrides enjoyment is not. It is a willpower account that depletes over time, and when it runs out, you stop. This is why so many adult learners quit. Not because they lack discipline. Because they have used discipline as a substitute for engagement, and discipline, unlike engagement, has a shelf life.
The Three Energizers
The framework that helped me operationalize this was Abdaal’s concept of the Three Energizers: Play, Power, and People.
Play is the curiosity element. Approaching practice as exploration rather than obligation. Trying things because they are interesting, not because they are on the schedule.
Power is the autonomy element. Choosing what to work on based on what engages you, not what someone else told you to prioritize. Having control over your own practice creates a sense of agency that fuels continued effort.
People is the connection element. Practicing with or for someone else changes the emotional texture of the session entirely. Even sharing a recording with a fellow learner — having one other person who cares about your progress — transforms solitary practice from isolation into connection.
I restructured my practice around these three principles. I start with whatever interests me most (Play). I choose my own focus rather than following someone else’s curriculum (Power). And I share my progress, even small moments, with at least one other person (People).
The sessions feel different now. Not easier — I still work on hard material, still push past comfort, still spend time in the zone of productive struggle. But the emotional foundation has changed. I am working hard from a state of engagement rather than from a state of obligation. The effort is the same. The emotional context is transformed.
The Lesson for Every Adult Learner
If you are learning anything as an adult — magic, music, a language, a sport, anything — and the learning feels like a slog, the conventional advice is: push through. Be disciplined. Winners do not quit.
That advice is not wrong, exactly. It is incomplete. And its incompleteness makes it dangerous, because pushing through discomfort works for a while, and then it does not, and when it stops working, the only conclusion available is that you lack discipline. That there is something wrong with your work ethic. That you are not tough enough.
The real conclusion, supported by research, is that you have the order of operations backwards. You are trying to discipline your way to enjoyment, and that direction does not work. The direction that works is the reverse: find the enjoyment first, and let discipline grow from it.
Feeling good does not come after getting good. It comes before. It is not the reward for mastery. It is the prerequisite.
I learned this late. Years into my journey, after hundreds of grim hotel room sessions that produced less progress than they should have. But I learned it. And every practice session since has been built on a different foundation — not the gritted teeth and the running timer, but the genuine curiosity and the lost track of time.
The timer is gone from my desk now. The cards are still there. And most nights, when I sit down, I am smiling before I pick them up.
That smile is not decoration. According to the research, it is the most important part of the session.