The first person who told me magic was a waste of time was a colleague. A fellow consultant. We were at dinner after a long day of client workshops — somewhere in Vienna, one of those restaurants where the candles are low and the wine is good and the conversation turns honest. I had mentioned, casually, that I had been spending my evenings in hotel rooms learning card tricks. I said it the way you might mention a new hobby. Light. Conversational.
He looked at me like I had said I was collecting bottle caps.
“Card tricks?” he said. “Really? You have the kind of mind that could be building companies, and you’re spending your nights on card tricks?”
He was not being cruel. He was genuinely confused. In his framework — the framework we both lived in, the strategy consulting world of serious people doing serious things — spending hours practicing sleight of hand was not just unusual. It was inexplicable. It was a misallocation of resources. A waste of cognitive capital.
I laughed it off. Changed the subject. Ordered another glass of wine.
And that night, back in my hotel room, I almost did not practice. For the first time since I had started, I almost left the cards in my suitcase. His words had landed somewhere I did not expect. Not in my rational mind, where I could have easily argued against them. In my identity. In the part of me that had spent years building a self-image as a serious professional, and that now questioned whether what I was doing was compatible with that image.
The Accumulation
That dinner was not an isolated incident. Over the months and years that followed, the skepticism accumulated.
A friend in Graz who, upon seeing me do an effect at a dinner party, said with a gentle smile, “That’s fun, but isn’t it kind of… a kids’ thing?” My own childhood association with magic — the Austrian clown performer, the bad experience that had kept me away from magic for decades — echoed in her words. She was articulating a bias I had once held myself.
A business contact who heard I was involved in a magic company and visibly recalibrated his assessment of me. I could see it in his eyes — the slight downgrade. The reframing. The consultant who builds strategy for startups was becoming, in his mental model, the consultant who does card tricks. And those two categories, in his world, did not occupy the same tier.
Family members who were supportive in the way family is supportive of things they do not understand. “That’s nice, Felix.” The same tone they would use if I had announced I was taking up watercolor painting. Warm. Encouraging. Completely uninterested.
Each individual comment was minor. A raised eyebrow here. A gentle joke there. A subtle but unmistakable shift in how certain people perceived me. None of it was hostile. All of it was corrosive.
The cumulative effect was a low-grade ambient pressure to stop. Not overt. Nobody staged an intervention. But the social signals were consistent: this is not what someone like you does. This is not serious. This is beneath your professional caliber.
The Internal Battle
The external skepticism would not have mattered if it had not found allies inside my own head. But it did.
My own internal critic was more than happy to amplify the message. Every time a new technique took weeks to learn, the voice would say: “You could be spending this time on something productive.” Every time I fumbled a move in practice, it would add: “See? You’re not built for this.” Every time I spent money on props, on books, on tutorials, the voice did the arithmetic of opportunity cost.
The internal and external critics were in perfect harmony. The colleagues questioning my priorities from the outside. The voice questioning my abilities from the inside. Together, they created a two-front argument that was remarkably persuasive.
And here is the part that is hard to admit: for a while, they almost won. There was a period — maybe three or four months — where I scaled back significantly. My practice sessions got shorter. My purchases stopped. My engagement with the magic community faded. I was not quitting, exactly. I was attenuating. Letting the interest dim in response to the social and internal pressure to return to “normal.”
What Pulled Me Back
What reversed the decline was not a dramatic event. It was a quiet observation.
I was at a networking event in Linz — a business function, the kind of thing I attend regularly. The evening was fine. The conversation was fine. The wine was fine. And at the end of the evening, walking back to my car, I realized I had felt nothing. The entire event had been competent, professional, polished, and utterly forgettable. I had performed my consultant role perfectly. And the performance had meant nothing to me.
Then I thought about the last time I had sat in a hotel room with my cards. The quiet concentration. The feeling of a sequence finally clicking after days of work. The tiny rush of accomplishment when a move that had been clumsy became smooth. The sense that I was building something that was entirely mine — not a client’s strategy, not a company’s initiative, not someone else’s vision. Mine.
The contrast was stark. The business event, which everyone in my life considered the “serious” activity, left me empty. The card practice, which everyone considered the “waste of time,” filled me up.
That night, I took the cards out of the suitcase. And I did not put them back.
The Fuel Conversion
The shift that happened next was not instant. It developed over months. But at some point, I noticed that the skepticism — the raised eyebrows, the gentle jokes, the subtle downgrades in how people perceived me — had changed function. It was no longer draining me. It was fueling me.
Not in the aggressive, “I’ll show them” sense. I have never been wired for spite as a motivator. It was subtler than that. The skepticism was clarifying. Each dismissive comment forced me to answer a question that the supporters never asked: Why am I doing this?
The supporters — the friends who thought it was cool, Adam who shared the passion, fellow magic enthusiasts who understood the obsession — never required me to justify my investment. They accepted it. And acceptance, while wonderful, does not sharpen your understanding of your own motivations.
The skeptics demanded justification. And in constructing that justification — in articulating to myself why I was spending hundreds of hours on something that the “serious” world considered trivial — I discovered things about my own motivations that I would never have uncovered in a supportive vacuum.
I discovered that magic gave me a creative outlet that consulting never had. Consulting is analytical. It is systematic. It is logical. Magic, at its core, is creative. It is about making impossible things feel real. It engages parts of my mind that years of strategy work had left dormant.
I discovered that the practice itself — the quiet, focused, solitary act of working with my hands in a hotel room — was a form of meditation that no app or technique had ever given me. The cards demanded my full attention. When I was practicing, I was not thinking about clients, deadlines, or invoices. I was entirely present. And that presence was therapeutic in a way I had not known I needed.
I discovered that the challenge of performing — of standing in front of other human beings and creating an experience that makes them feel something — scratched an itch that boardroom presentations never reached. A consulting presentation aims for agreement. A magic performance aims for wonder. And wonder, it turns out, is what I had been missing.
None of these discoveries would have been forced to the surface if everyone around me had simply said “Great, have fun with your card tricks.” The skepticism pressurized the question, and the pressure produced clarity.
The Professional Integration
The deepest irony is this: the thing my colleagues called a waste of time became the thing that made me better at my job.
When I started incorporating magic into my keynote speaking, the response was immediate and unmistakable. Audiences that had been polite and professional during standard business presentations became engaged, energized, and memorable. The combination of strategic content with magical moments created a presentation format that nobody else in my consulting world was offering. The “waste of time” became a competitive advantage.
When Adam and I built Vulpine Creations, the business skills that my colleagues valued so highly turned out to be the perfect complement to the magic skills they had dismissed. Strategy and magic. Analytics and creativity. The “serious” and the “frivolous,” combined into a company that neither skill set could have built alone.
The colleague at dinner who told me I had the kind of mind that could be building companies was right about one thing. I did have that kind of mind. But he was wrong about the conclusion. The magic was not a distraction from building companies. It became the catalyst for building one.
What I Would Tell Them Now
I do not harbor any resentment toward the people who questioned my choices. How could I? They were operating from the same framework I had operated from my entire adult life. Serious people do serious things. Time is a resource. Every hour spent on something “unproductive” is an hour stolen from something productive.
That framework is coherent. It is logical. And it is incomplete.
What it misses is the non-linear nature of personal development. The assumption that skills develop in straight lines — that time spent on magic is time not spent on consulting, a clean trade-off — ignores the reality that skills cross-pollinate. My practice discipline in magic improved my discipline in business. My performance skills on stage improved my presentation skills in boardrooms. My understanding of audience psychology in magic deepened my understanding of client psychology in consulting.
The “waste of time” was an investment with delayed and indirect returns. The skeptics could not see the returns because they were looking for them in the wrong place. They were looking for magic to produce magic results. Instead, it produced results that showed up everywhere else in my life.
The Gratitude
I am genuinely thankful now. Not in the performative way, where you claim gratitude because it sounds enlightened. Genuinely, practically, specifically thankful.
Thankful to the colleague at dinner, because his question forced me to articulate why magic mattered to me, and the articulation made the commitment stronger.
Thankful to the friend in Graz, because her “kids’ thing” comment pushed me to think seriously about what differentiates real magic performance from the birthday-party stereotype, which became a founding principle of how I approach my craft.
Thankful to the business contacts who downgraded their assessment of me, because their skepticism motivated me to integrate magic into my professional work at such a high level that the integration itself became a proof of concept.
Thankful to the family members who did not understand, because their gentle indifference taught me that this passion was mine, not theirs, and that seeking external validation for something intrinsically meaningful is a waste of the very time they thought I was wasting.
And thankful, in a strange way, to the internal critic who amplified every external doubt. Because that critic forced me to build a case for my own path so thoroughly that, by the time the case was built, no amount of external skepticism could touch it.
The Principle
The principle, stripped of the personal story, is this: the people who challenge your unconventional choices are performing a service they do not intend. They are testing the depth of your commitment. They are forcing you to articulate what you might otherwise leave vague. They are creating the friction that either stops you — in which case, perhaps, you should be stopped — or hardens you into something more resilient than you were before.
If your interest cannot survive a raised eyebrow, it was not a real interest. It was a whim. And whims are supposed to die.
If your interest survives the eyebrows, the jokes, the professional reappraisals, and the low-grade ambient pressure of a world that does not understand what you are doing — if it survives all of that and grows stronger — then you have something real. Something that has been tested. Something that earned its place in your life not by default but by surviving the selection pressure that kills everything that does not belong.
My magic survived. It was tested by skeptics, by my own doubts, by the gap between the “serious” professional world I inhabited and the “frivolous” art form I had fallen into. And it survived every test. Not because I was brave. Not because I was stubborn. Because it was real.
The people who said it was a waste of time proved that it was not. And for that, I owe them more than they will ever know.