There is a moment from a corporate event in Salzburg that I have never talked about publicly. It was one of my earlier performances, during the period when I was building my thirty-minute show because Adam and I had agreed that if you run a magic company, you need to be able to perform. I was on stage in front of about eighty people — a corporate audience, suits, conference attendees who had just come from three hours of presentations and wanted to be entertained.
I lost the audience in the first four minutes.
Not gradually. Not subtly. I could feel it happen in real time. The energy in the room shifted from polite attention to polite endurance. Eyes glazed. Phones appeared. Two people near the back started a quiet conversation. By the time I was into my second piece, I was performing to a room that had mentally checked out, and I still had twenty-five minutes to fill.
I finished the show. I smiled. I thanked the organizer. I packed my things. I drove back to my hotel. And then I sat in the parking garage for fifteen minutes, engine off, staring at the steering wheel, feeling like I had made the worst decision of my life.
That night was a red light. A full, unmistakable, traffic-stopping red.
The Book in the Suitcase
Sometime later — weeks, maybe months — I was on a flight and picked up Matthew McConaughey’s memoir Greenlights. I was not expecting it to be relevant to magic. I was expecting celebrity autobiography, maybe some amusing Hollywood stories. Something light for the flight.
What I got instead was a philosophy of failure and resilience that mapped so precisely onto my own experience that I started underlining passages with the kind of intensity I usually reserve for consulting frameworks.
McConaughey’s central metaphor is the green light — those moments when life says yes, when things flow, when the road is open and the timing is right. But the insight that stopped me was not about green lights. It was about red ones.
His argument is this: red lights — the failures, the setbacks, the moments when everything stops — are not obstacles to green lights. They are the raw material from which green lights are made. Every red light, given enough time, enough reflection, and enough willingness to learn from it, eventually reveals itself as a necessary step toward a green light that could not have happened without it.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The failure teaches you something, or forces a change, or redirects your path, and the new path leads somewhere better than the old one would have.
Reading that on the plane, I thought about the Salzburg show. I thought about the parking garage. And I thought about what had happened afterward.
What the Red Light Taught Me
The Salzburg disaster was not a mystery. In retrospect, the failure was entirely diagnosable. I had opened with material that was too slow for a corporate after-dinner crowd. I had not read the room — the energy level, the attention span, the fact that these people had been sitting in presentations all day and needed high engagement, not a gradual build. I had constructed my set based on what I thought was strong, not what the audience needed.
In the days after the show, once the sting had faded enough for analysis, I took the performance apart piece by piece. I asked myself the questions I ask my consulting clients after a failed initiative: What went wrong? What signals did I miss? What assumptions was I operating on? What would I do differently?
The answers reshaped my entire approach to show construction. I learned to think about the audience first and the material second. I learned to have multiple openers ready — a high-energy option, a medium-energy option, a conversational option — and to choose based on the room I walked into, not the set I had planned. I learned that the first three minutes of a corporate show are not a warmup. They are the audition. If you lose them in the first three minutes, you are performing to a room full of hostages.
These lessons became foundational to every show I have performed since. They are built into my preparation process, my pre-show assessment, my material selection. And none of them would exist without the Salzburg disaster.
The red light turned green. Not immediately. Not painlessly. But completely.
Persistence, Pivot, Concede
McConaughey frames life decisions through three choices: persistence, pivot, or concede. When you hit a red light, you have to decide which of these three responses is appropriate.
Persistence means pushing through. The obstacle is temporary. Stay the course. Keep doing what you are doing, and the light will change on its own.
Pivot means changing direction. The obstacle is telling you that your current path is wrong. Not that the destination is wrong — the destination may be perfect. But the route needs to change. Adjust, redirect, find a different way.
Concede means letting go. The obstacle is telling you that this particular goal, at this particular time, is not the right one. Release it. Walk away. Free your energy for something else.
I have used all three in my magic journey, and the hardest part has always been knowing which one to choose.
After Salzburg, the choice was pivot. The destination — becoming a competent performer — was right. The route — my set construction, my audience reading, my opening strategy — was wrong. I did not need to push harder. I needed to change course.
There have been other moments where persistence was the right call. A particular technique I was learning that refused to cooperate for weeks. The temptation to abandon it was strong. But the technique was fundamental, and the difficulty was not a sign that I was on the wrong path — it was a sign that the path was steep. I persisted. The technique eventually came. It is now one of my strongest pieces.
And there have been moments where concede was the answer. An effect I spent months developing that never worked reliably under performance conditions. A presentation approach that I loved but that audiences consistently did not respond to. A piece of material that I was emotionally attached to but that was never going to be good enough for my show. Letting go of those was painful every time. But every time, the release freed energy and attention that I redirected toward something better.
The Salzburg Domino Chain
Here is the part that McConaughey’s framework helped me see. The Salzburg failure did not just fix my opening strategy. It started a domino chain of improvements that I could not have predicted.
The new opening strategy led me to study audience psychology more seriously. The study of audience psychology led me to Ken Weber’s work. Weber’s framework — the Six Pillars — restructured how I thought about entertainment as a whole. That restructuring influenced how I selected material for my show. The new material selection led me to effects that were more visually impactful and more emotionally engaging. The stronger material gave me more confidence on stage. The increased confidence improved my delivery. The better delivery got better audience reactions. The better reactions confirmed that the new approach was working.
All of this — every link in that chain — traces back to a parking garage in Salzburg where I sat with the engine off, feeling like a failure.
If the Salzburg show had gone well, none of this would have happened. I would have continued with my original approach — the slow opener, the material-first-audience-second thinking, the set that was designed for what I wanted to perform rather than what the audience needed to experience. I would have continued getting mediocre results and never understood why.
The failure was the catalyst. The red light was the beginning of a green-light chain that is still extending.
The Pattern I Started to See
Once I adopted this lens, I started seeing the pattern everywhere in my journey.
The bad childhood experience with the clown performer in Austria — the experience that gave me a negative view of magic for decades. That was a red light that lasted years. But it meant that when I finally came to magic as an adult, I came without the romantic illusions that trap many beginners. I did not think magic was inherently wonderful. I thought most magic was terrible, performed by people who did not understand their audience. That critical eye — born from the red light of the childhood experience — became one of my greatest assets as a performer and as a magic product designer.
The loneliness of two hundred nights a year in hotels. A red light in any normal sense — isolation, disconnection, the grinding absence of home. But that isolation gave me something invaluable: uninterrupted practice time. Hundreds of hours, alone in quiet rooms, with no distractions and no social obligations. The very thing that made the road life difficult also created the conditions for deep, focused skill development.
The nervousness of my early performances. Red lights, every one of them. Shaking hands. Lost train of thought. Fumbled sequences that I could execute perfectly in my hotel room. Each one was miserable in the moment. And each one taught me something about the gap between practice and performance that no amount of hotel room training could have revealed.
The Reframe That Changed My Relationship with Failure
McConaughey’s philosophy is not about toxic positivity. It is not about pretending that failures are secretly wonderful. The Salzburg parking garage was not wonderful. The shaking hands during my early performances were not wonderful. The product development setbacks at Vulpine Creations were not wonderful in the moment.
The reframe is retrospective. It is the practice of looking back at a red light, after enough time has passed to see its consequences, and asking: what green light did this eventually make possible? Not “was this failure okay?” That is a question of consolation. But “what did this failure enable?” That is a question of analysis.
And the answer, in my experience, is always something. The failure always enabled something. Sometimes something small — a minor adjustment, a slight improvement, a useful data point. Sometimes something transformative — a complete restructuring of approach, a fundamental shift in understanding, a new direction that would not have been visible from the old path.
The discipline I try to practice now is this: when I am sitting in the metaphorical parking garage — when the show went badly, when the new product hit a wall, when the technique is not coming together, when everything feels stuck and wrong — I do not try to make myself feel better by saying “this is a future green light.” That is too abstract to help in the moment.
What I do instead is simply make a note. I write down what happened. I write down what I think went wrong. I write down what I might change. And I put the note aside, because the analysis of failure is more productive than the experience of failure, and the analysis usually needs some distance before it becomes useful.
Then I wait. And eventually, weeks or months later, the red light turns. It always does. Not always into what I expected. Sometimes into something better than what I expected.
The Courage Requirement
There is one aspect of this philosophy that McConaughey does not sugarcoat, and I will not either. For a red light to become a green light, you have to keep driving. The transformation does not happen to people who pull over and park permanently. It happens to people who sit in the parking garage, feel the failure fully, and then start the engine again.
After Salzburg, I performed again. After the shaking-hands performances, I performed again. After every setback with Vulpine Creations, Adam and I went back to work. The red light turns green only if you are still on the road when it does.
This is where persistence, pivot, and concede become crucial tools. You do not have to persist on the same road. Pivoting is fine. Conceding on one specific goal to pursue a better one is fine. But you have to keep driving. The red light becomes a permanent stop only if you let it.
I think about this often. I think about the version of me who could have quit in that Salzburg parking garage. Who could have decided that the failure was evidence that he had no business performing. Who could have packed the cards away and gone back to being a full-time consultant with a weird hobby he no longer practiced.
That version of me would never have met the green lights that followed. The rebuilt show. The stronger material. The partnership with Adam. The products we created. The keynotes where magic became the element that made the message unforgettable.
All of those green lights were downstream from a red light in a Salzburg parking garage. And they would have remained unlit if I had let the red light be the final light.
The Ongoing Practice
I still hit red lights. Regularly. A show that does not land the way I planned. A new technique that resists learning for weeks. A business challenge that seems intractable. The red lights have not stopped.
What has changed is my relationship with them. I no longer experience a red light as a verdict. I experience it as information. As the beginning of a process that I cannot yet see the end of, but that I have seen the end of enough times before to trust that the green light is out there, somewhere ahead, waiting for me to keep driving.
McConaughey wrote his memoir from the vantage point of someone who had accumulated decades of red lights that had turned green. The perspective of hindsight. I am still in the middle of my journey. Many of my red lights have not yet revealed their green successors.
But enough of them have. Enough of them have turned that I drive through the red lights now with something I did not have in that Salzburg parking garage.
Not certainty. Not optimism. Something more useful than both.
Patience.