In the previous post, I wrote about the two-to-four-year rule — the approximate timeline for reaching genuine competence in a complex performance skill. That post was about where I have been. This one is about where I am going.
Because competence, it turns out, is not the destination. It is barely the trailhead. The performers who leave audiences speechless, who create moments people remember for years, who seem to inhabit a different plane of ease and presence and authority — those performers did not get there in four years. They got there in ten. Sometimes twenty. Sometimes a lifetime.
And understanding that distinction — the difference between the competence that arrives in two to four years and the mastery that emerges after roughly a decade — has fundamentally changed how I think about my own development as a performer and as a person building something in this craft.
Where the Number Comes From
The ten-year rule is not my invention. It has appeared in research across a surprising range of disciplines. Cognitive psychologists studying expert performance have documented it repeatedly: roughly ten years or ten thousand hours of deliberate, focused practice is what it takes to reach the level of performance that we recognize as mastery. Chess grandmasters. Concert pianists. Olympic athletes. Surgeons. The specific number varies by individual and domain, but the order of magnitude is consistent.
This is not the pop-psychology version you may have heard, the oversimplified claim that ten thousand hours of anything makes you world-class. The nuance matters. It is ten thousand hours of deliberate practice — structured, focused, directed at specific areas of weakness. And the outcome is not guaranteed mastery. It is the approximate minimum investment required to be in the conversation.
For magic and mentalism, the pattern holds. The performers I admire most have typically been performing seriously for a decade or more. Not just practicing. Performing. Living inside the craft until it became part of who they are rather than something they do.
When I look at where I am in my own journey, maybe eight or nine years in since buying that first deck of cards from ellusionist.com and watching tutorials in hotel rooms, I can feel the difference between where I was at year four and where I am now. The competence that arrived around year two felt like a threshold I crossed. What has been building since feels more like a slow, deep change in how I think, how I see, and how I relate to an audience.
Competence Versus Mastery
The distinction between competence and mastery is not merely quantitative. It is not that masters are better at the same things competent performers do. It is that they are doing something qualitatively different.
Competence means you can execute. Your technique is reliable. Your routines work. You can handle the standard situations a performance throws at you. You can read a room well enough to adjust your energy and pacing. When things go wrong, you can recover without the audience knowing.
Mastery is something else entirely.
Mastery means you are no longer executing routines. You are having a conversation with the audience through the medium of magic. The routine is not the thing — it is the vehicle for the thing. The technique is so deeply embedded that it has become invisible not just to the audience but to you. Your attention is entirely free to be where it should always be: on the human being in front of you and the experience you are creating together.
I have felt flashes of this. Moments in performance where the script and the moves and the staging all disappeared, and what was left was just me and the people in the room and something happening between us that was bigger than any trick. Those moments are rare for me now. For the performers who have been at this for a decade or more, those moments are the norm.
That is the difference. Not doing the same thing better. Doing a fundamentally different thing.
The Three Shifts That Happen After Year Four
Looking at my own trajectory and studying the development of performers far more accomplished than I am, I have identified three shifts that seem to happen in the years between competence and mastery.
The first shift is from conscious to unconscious processing. In the early years, every element of a performance requires active attention. Technique, script, staging, audience management — all competing for bandwidth simultaneously. It is like learning to drive: every control requires conscious thought.
After year four, the lower-level skills become automatic. Technique runs itself. The script flows without monitoring. This frees cognitive resources for higher-order concerns: the emotional arc, the specific energy of this audience, the subtle adjustments that turn good into great.
This shift cannot be compressed. Automaticity is a product of repetition over time. The neural pathways that allow unconscious execution need thousands of repetitions spread across years, not crammed into weeks.
The second shift is from imitation to voice. In the first years, everyone imitates. You learn from tutorials, from books, from watching performers you admire. Your style is a patchwork of borrowed elements. This is not a flaw — it is how every artist in every discipline begins. You absorb influences, try on different approaches, and gradually discover what fits.
But somewhere between year four and year ten, a different process takes over. The borrowed elements start to merge and transform. What was imitation becomes synthesis. What was patchwork becomes personality. You stop sounding like a composite of your influences and start sounding like yourself.
I am in the middle of this shift right now, and it is both exciting and uncomfortable. Some of the approaches I borrowed from performers I admire are starting to feel wrong — not wrong for them, but wrong for me. The way I script a routine, the way I interact with volunteers, the way I structure the emotional arc of a piece — these are becoming distinctly mine, even when I can still trace the original influences. The patchwork is becoming fabric.
The third shift is from performance to presence. This is the hardest to describe and the most powerful to witness. In the competence years, performing is an activity you do. You step into performer mode, execute the show, and step back out. There is a version of you that performs and a version of you that does not, and the transition between them is conscious.
In the mastery years, the boundary dissolves. Performance becomes an extension of who you are rather than a role you step into. The presence you bring to the stage is the same presence you bring to a conversation, amplified but not fundamentally different. The audience is not watching a performance — they are watching a person, and the person happens to be doing extraordinary things.
I have seen this in performers who have been at it for decades. There is a settledness to them. A groundedness. They are not working to create an impression. They are simply present, and the impression follows naturally.
McConaughey’s Conservative Early, Liberal Late
There is a passage in Greenlights where McConaughey describes a principle he calls “conservative early, liberal late.” In any new endeavor, you need discipline and fundamentals first. Then, once you earn knowledge of the space, the craft, and the people, you can let your creative instincts fly. He puts it this way: “Creativity needs borders. Individuality needs resistance. The earth needs gravity. Without them, there is no form, no art. Only chaos.”
This maps perfectly onto the competence-to-mastery arc. The first four years are conservative. You learn the rules. You study the traditions. You build the scaffolding.
The years between four and ten are where liberal begins. You have earned the right to break the rules intelligently. To depart from the script. To bring your own personality to the craft in ways that would have been disastrous in year one but are now informed by deep structural understanding.
The masters I admire are rule-breakers who once followed the rules so thoroughly that they understand exactly what they are breaking and why. Their freedom looks effortless, but it is built on a foundation of discipline that took a decade to construct.
Why This Is Liberating, Not Depressing
When I first confronted the ten-year timeline, I felt the weight of it. A decade. I was a strategy consultant who had picked up a deck of cards in a hotel room. A decade felt like a sentence, not a promise.
But the more I sat with the idea, the more it shifted from burden to liberation. And it shifted for a specific reason that Ali Abdaal’s productivity research helped me articulate. Abdaal writes about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation — and about a middle ground he calls “identified motivation.” This is when you genuinely value the goal, even when the process itself is not always enjoyable. When intrinsic motivation wanes, and it always does, identified motivation — the deep connection between what you are doing and what you value — is the only fuel that sustains both performance and satisfaction over the long haul.
The ten-year timeline only feels oppressive if you are waiting for it to end. If you are counting down, enduring the process for the sake of the outcome, a decade is brutal.
But if you are not counting down — if the process itself has become part of your identity, if the daily engagement with the craft is not a means to mastery but a way of living — then ten years is not a sentence. It is a horizon. A direction you are walking, not a finish line you are sprinting toward.
I stopped asking when will I be a master? and started asking what kind of practitioner am I today? That shift, small as it sounds, changed my relationship with time completely.
What I Am Building Toward
I am roughly eight or nine years into this journey now. Not a decade yet. Not a master. But I can see the trajectory, and I can feel the shifts I described above happening in real time.
My technique is becoming unconscious in ways that free my attention for the audience. My voice as a performer is emerging from the influences that shaped it. My presence on stage is beginning to feel less like a role and more like an expression of who I actually am.
These changes are gradual. Day to day, they are invisible. Month to month, barely perceptible. But year to year, they are unmistakable. The person who performs now is not the same person who performed at year four, just as the person at year four was not the same person who nervously showed his first card trick to a colleague in a Vienna hotel bar.
What I am building toward is not a specific achievement. Not a show, not a title, not a reputation. What I am building toward is the version of myself that has fully integrated this craft into who I am. The version where magic and mentalism are not things I do alongside my consulting and keynote work, but an essential part of how I think, how I communicate, and how I connect with other people.
That integration takes time. More time than I originally imagined. But the time is going to pass regardless. The only question is whether, when the ten-year mark arrives, I will have used those years to become someone who was worth becoming.
The Patience of the Long Game
There is something McConaughey says about his twenty-month career reinvention that resonates here. After declining every role that did not fit who he wanted to become, after watching the offers dry up entirely, he wrote: “By saying no, the target drew the arrow.”
Mastery works the same way. You do not chase it. You create the conditions for it to arrive. You practice with intention. You perform with presence. You study with curiosity. And you trust that the slow, deep work you are doing today is building something that will only become visible years from now.
The ten-year mark is not a deadline. It is a reminder that the most valuable things in any craft are the things that cannot be rushed.
I am not there yet. But I am closer today than I was yesterday.
One in a row. Then one more. Over and over until the end. That is how mastery works. Not in a blinding flash of arrival, but in the quiet accumulation of days and sessions and performances and small, hard-won improvements that compound over years into something that looks, from the outside, like it was always there.
It was not always there. It was built. Slowly. With patience that looked, in the middle of it, a lot like stubbornness.
The ten-year mark. I am walking toward it. And the walk itself is the point.