There was a period — maybe six months, maybe longer — where my practice sessions had all the joy of filing tax returns.
I would come back to my hotel room after a long day of consulting work, sit down at the desk, pull out my cards, and begin. Not because I wanted to. Because I was supposed to. Because I had committed to daily practice. Because discipline was the thing that separated serious performers from hobbyists, and I was going to be serious if it killed me.
And it was killing me. Slowly, methodically, one joyless session at a time.
I had a checklist. I had a timer. I had specific goals for each session — work on this technique for twenty minutes, run through this routine three times, drill this particular sequence until it hit 90% consistency. The sessions were structured, measured, and productive in the narrow sense that I could tick boxes at the end.
But they were grim. There is no other word for it. They were grim in the way that going to the gym at 5 AM is grim when you hate the gym. You do it because you are supposed to, you get through it because you are disciplined, and you feel a dull sense of accomplishment afterwards that is really just relief that it is over.
The problem was not that I was learning nothing. I was learning. My technique improved. My consistency increased. The boxes got ticked. But the rate of improvement had flattened, my enthusiasm had cratered, and I was starting to dread the very activity that had pulled me into magic in the first place.
Something was wrong with my approach. I just did not know what.
The Cafeteria Story
The answer came from an unexpected direction. I was reading Ali Abdaal’s work on productivity and positive psychology — research I was initially exploring for my consulting practice, not for magic — when I came across a story about Richard Feynman that stopped me cold.
Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had hit a wall. After working on the Manhattan Project and dealing with personal tragedy, he found himself burned out and unable to do productive physics. He was going through the motions at Cornell, teaching classes, attending meetings, but the creative spark that had made him one of the great minds in physics had gone dark. He was doing the work, but the work was not working.
Then one day in the cafeteria, someone threw a plate in the air. Feynman noticed that the plate wobbled as it spun, and that the wobble and the spin seemed to have a particular relationship. He started playing with the physics of it. Not because it was useful. Not because it would lead to a paper or a discovery or career advancement. Just because it was interesting. Just because it caught his attention and he wanted to understand it.
That play — that pure, purposeless, curiosity-driven exploration — led him back to the diagrams and equations that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. The breakthrough came not from grinding harder, not from more discipline, not from forcing himself through another joyless session of productive work. It came from play.
Abdaal used this story to illustrate a broader principle from the science of positive psychology: the Broaden and Build theory. The research shows that positive emotions — joy, curiosity, playful engagement — actually expand your cognitive resources. They broaden your awareness, make you more creative, help you see connections you would miss in a state of grim determination. Negative emotions — stress, obligation, the feeling of being forced — narrow your focus. They make you efficient at repetitive tasks but terrible at creative ones.
I read that and recognized myself immediately. I had been practicing magic in a state of grim determination for months. My focus was narrow. My creativity was dead. I was efficient at ticking boxes but terrible at the creative, exploratory work that actually produces breakthroughs.
The Grim Discipline Myth
Before I go further, let me address the obvious objection, because I had it too: discipline matters. Of course it matters. You cannot build any skill without consistent effort. You cannot master sleight of hand by practicing only when you feel like it. The professionals I admire most — the ones whose work inspired me to take magic seriously — are disciplined practitioners who show up every day regardless of how they feel.
All true. And all beside the point.
The question is not whether discipline matters. It is whether discipline alone is sufficient. And the answer, based on both the research and my own experience, is no.
Discipline gets you to the desk. It gets the cards in your hands. It keeps you showing up night after night in hotel rooms when you could be watching television or scrolling your phone or doing literally anything else. Discipline is the price of entry.
But discipline without enjoyment produces a specific kind of practice: mechanical, repetitive, focused on known quantities, resistant to exploration. It is practice that maintains skills but does not develop new ones. Practice that polishes but does not create. Practice that is reliable but never surprising.
The magic community — like every craft community I have encountered — worships discipline. The narrative is clear: the great ones practiced for hours every day, they sacrificed, they grinded, they suffered for their art. And this narrative is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete in a way that causes real damage.
Because what the narrative leaves out is that the great ones also loved it. They were not just disciplined — they were fascinated. They were not just grinding — they were exploring. The hours were long not because they were forcing themselves to endure them, but because they were so absorbed in what they were doing that the hours disappeared.
That is a fundamentally different experience from what I was having in my hotel room, staring at a timer, counting down the minutes until I could stop.
The Eight Ways to Play
One of the most useful frameworks I found in Abdaal’s work was the concept of play personalities — originally from the research of Stuart Brown. The idea is that there is not one kind of play. There are at least eight distinct types, and different people are drawn to different ones.
There is the Explorer, who is driven by discovering new things. The Competitor, who is motivated by challenge and measurement. The Collector, who finds joy in accumulating and organizing. The Creator, who needs to make things. The Storyteller, who experiences the world through narrative. The Joker, who finds energy in humor and spontaneity. The Director, who loves orchestrating and organizing systems. The Kinesthete, who finds play through physical movement and sensation.
When I read through these descriptions, something clicked. I had been treating practice as a single, monolithic activity — sit down, work through the checklist, get it done. But practice is not monolithic. It has many dimensions, and different dimensions connect to different play personalities.
The dimension of practice that lights me up is not repetitive drilling. It never has been. What lights me up is the exploration — finding a new technique I have never seen before, understanding the psychology behind why an effect works, discovering a connection between two ideas that nobody has put together in quite that way. I am an Explorer. My consulting career is built on exploration — finding patterns, making connections, discovering insights that others have missed.
When I was grinding through my checklist, I was ignoring the Explorer entirely. I was trying to be a pure Competitor — hit the metrics, beat the timer, improve the numbers — and while competition can be useful, it was not my primary source of energy. I was running on the wrong fuel.
The Experiment
I decided to test the Feynman principle directly. For one week, I abandoned my checklist entirely. No timer. No goals. No metrics. I would sit down with my cards and do whatever interested me.
The first night was uncomfortable. Without the checklist, I did not know what to do. I shuffled aimlessly for a few minutes, feeling like I was wasting time. Then I remembered a technique I had seen in passing months earlier — something that caught my eye but never made it onto the checklist because it was not directly relevant to my repertoire. I pulled up the tutorial and started exploring it.
Two hours later, I looked up and realized I had missed my planned bedtime by ninety minutes. I had not noticed the time passing. I had not been counting minutes. I had been absorbed — genuinely, fully, joyfully absorbed — in figuring out how this technique worked, what it felt like in my hands, what possibilities it opened up.
I had not ticked a single box on my nonexistent checklist. And it was the best practice session I had had in months.
The second night, I went down a rabbit hole into the history of a classic effect. Not practicing it — reading about it, watching old footage, tracing its evolution through different performers over decades. This led me to a presentation idea that I would never have found through my normal practice routine, because my normal practice routine did not include exploration. It included only execution.
By the third night, I was mixing exploration with practice in a way that felt natural rather than forced. I would explore something that interested me, then practice the parts that were technically demanding, then explore again. The practice was still disciplined — I was still working on technique, still pushing for consistency — but it was embedded in a context of curiosity rather than obligation.
The difference in my engagement was dramatic. The difference in my rate of improvement was, honestly, even more dramatic.
Why Play Produces Better Results
The science behind this is straightforward, even if the implications feel counterintuitive.
When you are in a positive emotional state — curious, engaged, playful — your brain operates differently than when you are in a neutral or negative state. The prefrontal cortex is more active. Working memory capacity increases. Associative thinking — the ability to connect disparate ideas — improves significantly. You literally think better when you are enjoying what you are doing.
This matters enormously for creative skills like magic. The technical dimension of magic — the mechanical execution of techniques — can be drilled in a state of grim determination. But the creative dimension — finding new presentations, making unexpected connections, developing your unique style — requires exactly the kind of broad, associative thinking that positive emotions produce.
And here is the part that really surprised me: even the technical drilling improved when I embedded it in a context of play. Not because I was practicing more (I was actually practicing slightly less by the clock), but because the quality of my attention was higher. When I drilled a technique because I was curious about what it could do, I paid closer attention to the details than when I drilled it because the checklist said I should.
The grim discipline approach optimizes for quantity of practice time. The playful approach optimizes for quality of attention during practice time. And quality of attention, it turns out, matters more than quantity of time by a wide margin.
The Integration
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that discipline is unnecessary. I am not saying that you should only practice when you feel like it. I am not saying that structured practice is bad.
What I am saying is that the structure should serve the engagement, not replace it. The discipline should get you to the desk. But once you are at the desk, the play should take over.
My practice now looks different from both the grim checklist and the completely unstructured exploration. It is a hybrid. I have broad goals — things I am working on, techniques I want to develop, routines I want to refine. But within those broad goals, I follow my curiosity. If something catches my attention, I pursue it. If a tangent looks interesting, I take it. If I find myself absorbed in something that was not on the plan, I do not fight it — I lean in.
The checklist still exists, but it is a loose guide, not a prison sentence. If I hit every item on it, fine. If I miss half of them because I went deep on something unexpected, also fine. The measure of a good session is not how many boxes I ticked but how engaged I was while I was ticking them.
What Feynman Knew
The plate in the cafeteria was, by any practical measure, irrelevant. It had nothing to do with quantum electrodynamics. It would not advance Feynman’s career. It would not solve any problem anyone cared about. It was, in the language of grim discipline, a waste of time.
But Feynman followed it because it was interesting. And that interest — that playful, purposeless, curiosity-driven engagement — reconnected him to the creative engine that discipline alone could not restart.
The parallel to my own experience is inexact but real. The techniques I explore out of curiosity, the history I read because it fascinates me, the tangents I follow because they catch my attention — these are my spinning plates. They do not always lead directly to a better show or a sharper technique. But they keep the creative engine running. They keep the engagement alive. They keep magic feeling like the thing I fell in love with in a hotel room years ago, rather than the obligation it had become.
Grim discipline got me to a plateau. Playful curiosity got me off it. And the research suggests that this is not a personal quirk but a general principle of human performance. We do our best work when the work feels like play. Not because play is easy — it is not, and the best play is often deeply challenging — but because play engages the full range of our cognitive resources in a way that obligation never can.
Feynman knew this. He followed the plate. And somewhere in a hotel room in Linz, years later, I finally understood what he was doing.