For the longest time, I treated practice energy as a fixed resource. Like a battery. You wake up with a certain charge, you spend it throughout the day on consulting work and travel and logistics and life, and whatever is left when you get back to your hotel room at night is what you have available for practice.
On good days, the battery still had enough juice. I could sit down with my cards and feel engaged. On bad days — after a difficult client meeting, a delayed flight, a frustrating call — the battery was drained. I would sit at the desk, stare at the cards, and feel nothing. No motivation. No interest. No energy. Just the grim knowledge that I was supposed to practice, and the even grimmer sensation that I did not want to.
My solution, for an embarrassingly long time, was willpower. Push through. Discipline yourself. Champions practice when they do not feel like it. This is what separates the serious from the casual.
And sometimes willpower worked. I would force myself through a thirty-minute session, feel the reluctant satisfaction of having done the thing, and go to bed. But the sessions born from willpower were consistently my worst. Mechanical. Shallow. Going through the motions without any genuine engagement. I was present physically but absent in every way that mattered.
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about practice energy as a battery and started thinking about it as something that can be generated. Not depleted throughout the day and drawn upon at night, but actively created through specific conditions. The distinction changed everything.
The Three Sources
Ali Abdaal’s research on productivity and positive psychology introduced me to a framework that he calls the Three Energizers: Play, Power, and People. The concept is simple. Human motivation and energy are not generic. They come from specific sources. And if you can identify which sources work for you and deliberately activate them, you can generate energy rather than just consuming it.
Play is the energy of curiosity, exploration, and enjoyment. It is the fuel that kept me up two hours past my bedtime exploring a technique that was not on my checklist. It is the energy of doing something because it is interesting, not because it is required. I wrote about this in my previous post on the Feynman principle, and it remains the most powerful energizer I have found for solo practice.
Power is the energy of autonomy, competence, and agency. It is the fuel that comes from feeling in control of your own development. From setting your own goals rather than following someone else’s curriculum. From choosing what to work on, how to work on it, and when to change direction. It is the energy of ownership.
People is the energy of connection, community, and shared experience. It is the fuel that comes from practicing with others, performing for others, discussing ideas with others, or simply knowing that you are part of a community of practitioners who share your passion.
Each of these three sources generates energy independently. And each can be deliberately activated, even on days when the battery feels dead.
Play in Practice
I covered Play extensively in the previous post, so I will keep this brief. The key insight is that Play is not the opposite of serious practice. It is the condition that makes serious practice sustainable.
My early checklist-driven sessions were serious but not playful. They were disciplined but joyless. And they produced diminishing returns because the engagement that powers deep learning was absent.
When I introduced playful elements — following curiosity instead of a rigid plan, exploring tangents that interested me, treating technical challenges as puzzles rather than obligations — the energy of the sessions transformed. Not because I was doing less work, but because the work felt different. Lighter. More absorbing. Less like something I was enduring and more like something I was choosing.
The practical application is straightforward: at the beginning of each session, I ask myself what interests me right now. Not what I should work on. Not what the curriculum demands. What genuinely catches my attention. And I start there. The should-work-on items get addressed eventually, but they get addressed in the context of engagement rather than obligation.
Power in Practice
Power — the energy of autonomy and agency — took me longer to understand, because I thought I already had it. I was practicing alone, in my hotel room, on my own schedule. Nobody was telling me what to do. How could I lack autonomy?
But autonomy is not just about the absence of external control. It is about the presence of internal ownership. And I realized, looking honestly at my practice, that I had been following other people’s programs for years.
My practice structure was borrowed from tutorials. My progression was based on someone else’s curriculum. My goals were shaped by what I thought a good magician should be working on, which was itself shaped by what I had read and heard from other magicians. Even my checklist — which felt like a personal creation — was really just a compilation of recommendations from various sources, assembled into a format that looked like my own work but was fundamentally derivative.
There is nothing wrong with learning from others. I have built this entire blog around the principle that studying what great performers and teachers have figured out is one of the most valuable things you can do. But there is a difference between studying others’ frameworks and living inside them permanently. At some point, you need to take ownership of your own development. You need to make your own decisions about what to work on, how to work on it, and what your goals actually are.
The moment I started making those decisions — not following a curriculum but actively choosing my own path based on what I wanted to achieve as a performer — something shifted. The sessions felt different. Not because the content changed dramatically, but because the relationship to the content changed. I was no longer executing someone else’s program. I was building my own.
This sense of ownership generated energy in a way that following instructions never did. When you are working on someone else’s plan, the motivation comes from external validation — am I doing it right? Am I making the progress I am supposed to make? When you are working on your own plan, the motivation comes from internal curiosity — is this approach working? What happens if I try it differently? What does my own experience tell me?
One specific change that activated the Power energizer: I stopped measuring my practice against other magicians’ standards and started measuring it against my own goals. My goal was not to be the best card technician in the world. My goal was to integrate magic and mentalism into my keynote speaking in a way that enhanced the message and created memorable experiences for corporate audiences. That is a very specific goal, and it requires a very specific kind of practice — one that no generic curriculum was designed to provide.
When I oriented my practice around that specific goal, the power of autonomy kicked in. Every decision I made about what to practice was mine, based on my understanding of what I needed, informed by but not dictated by what I had learned from others. The practice felt purposeful in a way it had not felt before.
People in Practice
This is the energizer I resisted longest, because my practice was, by its nature, solitary. Hotel rooms. Late nights. Solo work with a deck of cards and a laptop. The very image of the lone practitioner, grinding in isolation.
And there is value in solitary practice. Deep technique work requires concentration that is difficult to achieve in a social setting. The kind of focused, deliberate repetition that builds skill happens best in quiet, undistracted environments. I am not going to pretend that every practice session should be a social event.
But the People energizer does not require constant companionship. It requires connection. And connection can take many forms.
The most obvious form is performing. When I perform for an audience — even a small one, even informally — the energy I bring back to my next practice session is dramatically higher than when I have been practicing in isolation for weeks. Performance connects me to the reason I practice in the first place: the experience of creating something extraordinary in the space between myself and another human being.
But performing is not always available. I cannot do a show every night. What I can do is maintain connection in other ways.
Adam Wilber is the most important source of People energy in my magic life. Our conversations about Vulpine Creations, about effect design, about what is working and what is not — these conversations energize my practice in ways that are hard to quantify but impossible to miss. After a good call with Adam, I want to practice. Not because he told me to, but because the conversation reminded me why I care about this craft.
The broader magic community plays a similar role. Watching other performers — on video, at conventions, in live shows — connects me to the tradition and the community. It reminds me that I am not alone in this pursuit. That there are thousands of people around the world working on the same kinds of problems, pushing the same kinds of boundaries, experiencing the same kinds of frustrations and breakthroughs.
Even reading about magic — the history, the theory, the biographies of great performers — activates the People energizer. Not because I am physically with other people, but because I am mentally in conversation with them. When I read about the development of a classic effect, I am in dialogue with generations of performers who refined it. When I study a great performer’s approach to presentation, I am learning from someone who solved a problem I am currently facing.
The practical application: I deliberately schedule connection before practice. If I have a call with Adam in the afternoon, I know my evening session will be stronger. If I watch a great performance on video before I sit down with my cards, the cards feel different in my hands. If I read a chapter of a magic book over dinner, the ideas are still buzzing when I start working.
Isolation is the enemy of the People energizer, and for someone who practices primarily in hotel rooms, isolation is the default. Fighting that default — actively seeking connection in whatever form is available — is one of the highest-leverage changes I have made to my practice routine.
The Combination Effect
The Three Energizers are powerful individually. They are transformative in combination.
My best practice sessions — the ones where I lose track of time, make surprising breakthroughs, and come away feeling more energized than when I started — are sessions where all three energizers are active simultaneously.
Play: I am exploring something that genuinely interests me. Power: I am working on my own goals, making my own decisions about what to pursue and how to pursue it. People: I am connected to the community, to my partner, to the tradition, to the eventual audience who will experience this work.
When all three are firing, practice does not feel like an obligation. It does not feel like discipline. It does not even feel like work. It feels like the thing I most want to be doing with this particular hour of my life. And that feeling — that genuine desire to be doing exactly what I am doing — produces practice of a quality that no amount of willpower can match.
The Willpower Myth
I want to address willpower directly, because I spent years believing it was the primary fuel for practice, and I know many practitioners still believe the same thing.
Willpower is real. It exists. It can get you through a session when nothing else will. But willpower appears to be a limited resource — one that some researchers argue depletes with use, though this idea has been debated in recent years. What I can say from experience is that every decision you make during the day, every difficult conversation you navigate, every cognitively demanding task you complete seems to leave less mental energy for what comes next. By the time you get to your evening practice session, that energy may be nearly gone.
Building a practice life on willpower is like building a house on sand. It works until it does not. And when it stops working — when the willpower runs out, as it inevitably does — there is nothing underneath to support the structure.
The Three Energizers are the bedrock underneath. They generate energy rather than consuming it. They are renewable rather than finite. And they do not compete with the rest of your day for resources, because they operate through different psychological mechanisms than willpower.
When I practiced on willpower, I could sustain it for weeks, maybe months, before burning out. When I practice on Play, Power, and People, the sustainability is indefinite, because the practice itself generates the energy that the practice requires.
The Practical Framework
Here is how I structure my sessions now, built around the Three Energizers.
Before I sit down, I activate at least one energizer deliberately. Watch a performance. Call Adam. Read something that interests me. Revisit a idea that has been bouncing around in my head. Something — anything — that connects me to the why before I engage with the what.
When I sit down, I start with Play. What interests me right now? What am I curious about? What would I explore if I had no obligations and no checklist? I follow that impulse for as long as it lasts.
Throughout the session, I maintain Power by making my own decisions. If the plan says one thing and my instinct says another, I follow my instinct. If I want to abandon a technique that is not working and try something completely different, I do it. The plan serves me; I do not serve the plan.
And I maintain People by staying connected to the purpose. This is not abstract practice. This is preparation for the next time I stand in front of human beings and try to create something extraordinary. Those human beings are the reason for everything I do in this room. Keeping them in mind — not as pressure, but as purpose — keeps the People energizer alive even when I am alone.
The result is not perfect sessions every night. Some nights are still flat. Some nights the energy is low no matter what I do. But the floor has risen. My worst sessions now are better than my average sessions used to be. And my best sessions are in a category I did not know existed when I was running on willpower and checklists alone.
Play, Power, and People. Three words. Three sources of energy that changed how I practice, how I feel about practicing, and — ultimately — how I perform.