There is a word I kept circling back to during the first few years of my journey into magic, and that word is legitimacy. Not in the legal sense. Not in the credentialed sense. In the deeply personal, gut-level sense of whether you have the right to stand in front of other human beings and call yourself a performer.
I did not grow up performing. I did not have a family that put me on stage. I was a strategy consultant who bought a deck of cards in a hotel room because he was bored and could not bring his guitar on the road. There was no lineage, no mentor handing me a torch, no formal training, no institutional stamp of approval. There was just me, a laptop with tutorial videos from ellusionist.com, and hundreds of hotel room nights stretching out ahead of me.
The question that haunted me was not whether I could learn the techniques. I could see that the techniques were learnable. The question was whether I had earned the right to perform them for anyone other than myself.
That question, I have come to believe, cannot be answered by practice alone. It can only be answered by testing.
The Concept That Reframed Everything
I was reading Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights when a concept hit me with unexpected force. McConaughey describes rites of passage — moments where you deliberately put yourself in a position to be tested, where the outcome is uncertain and the stakes are real, and where the result, whatever it is, changes you. His stories are dramatic — exchange student years in Australia, solo walkabouts in the Amazon, turning down millions to reinvent his career. But the underlying principle is universal.
A rite of passage is not a graduation ceremony. It is not something someone gives you. It is something you take. You walk into a situation that is harder than what you have done before, you face whatever happens, and you come out the other side different from who you were going in. The change is not about whether you succeeded or failed. The change is that you went.
That reframing cracked something open in me. I had been waiting for legitimacy to arrive from the outside — from enough practice hours, from enough technique, from some vague threshold where I would feel ready. What I needed instead was to stop waiting and start testing.
The First Real Test
My first real rite of passage in magic was not performing for a crowd. It was performing for a single person.
I was in Vienna, staying at a hotel after a consulting engagement, and I had been practicing a card routine for weeks. Not casually — obsessively. I had drilled it in my room until the sequence was automatic, until my hands moved without conscious direction, until I could run through it while holding a conversation. By every measurable standard, I was ready.
But I had never done it for someone who did not know what was coming.
The hotel bar was quiet. A colleague from the engagement was having a drink. We had been talking about projects, deadlines, the usual. And there was a moment — a natural pause in conversation — where I could have pulled out the deck of cards in my jacket pocket and offered to show him something.
The fear was physical. My heart rate jumped. My palms got damp. Every instinct said: not yet. You are not ready. You need more practice. Tomorrow. Next week. When you are better.
I pulled out the cards.
What happened next was objectively fine. The routine worked. He reacted. It was not earth-shattering, but it was real — a real person, seeing something he did not expect, in a moment that was not rehearsed or controlled. And the feeling afterward was not pride in the technique. It was something more fundamental. I had crossed a line. I had taken a thing that existed only in hotel room solitude and brought it into the world.
That crossing is what a rite of passage feels like. Not triumph. Transformation.
Why Practice Alone Cannot Give You Legitimacy
There is a trap that analytical, systematic people fall into — and I am deeply one of those people. The trap is believing that if you prepare enough, you will eventually feel ready. That readiness is a function of preparation, and that the feeling of being prepared will naturally arrive once you have put in sufficient hours.
It does not work that way.
Preparation is necessary. I would never advocate performing before you have the technique down. But preparation without testing creates a particular kind of anxiety that actually gets worse over time, not better. The longer you practice without performing, the more you have invested, and the more terrifying the prospect of testing becomes. You have built something fragile in the isolation of your practice space, and the thought of exposing it to the unpredictable reality of a live audience feels less like an opportunity and more like a threat.
I know this because I lived it. There were stretches where I practiced for weeks without performing for anyone, and with each passing day, the gap between my private competence and my public confidence grew wider. I was getting better in the hotel room and more afraid outside of it.
The only cure was the test itself.
The Hierarchy of Tests
What I discovered — gradually, through trial and error — is that rites of passage come in a hierarchy. You do not need to jump from hotel room practice to a theater stage. There are intermediate steps, each one a genuine test with genuine stakes, each one earning a piece of the legitimacy you need.
The first level is one person. A colleague, a friend, a stranger at a bar. Someone who does not know you are a magician, who has no context for what you are about to do, and whose reaction is completely unfiltered.
The second level is a small group. Three to five people, probably at a dinner or a social gathering. The dynamics change completely. You are not having a private conversation anymore. You are performing. People are watching each other watch you. The social pressure amplifies everything.
The third level is a room. Ten, twenty, fifty people. A corporate event, a private party, a conference after-dinner slot. Now you need projection, presence, and the ability to hold attention across a space. The techniques that worked at a dinner table do not automatically scale.
The fourth level is a stage. Lights, microphone, an audience that has specifically come to see you. The expectations are different. The margin for error is narrower. The reward is proportionally greater.
Each level is a rite of passage. Each one tests something the previous one did not. And each one, once you have been through it, gives you something that no amount of preparation in isolation can provide: the knowledge that you can do it.
Not the belief. Not the hope. The knowledge.
The Consulting Parallel
My background in strategy consulting gave me an unexpected advantage in understanding this dynamic, once I saw it clearly.
In consulting, there is a moment that every junior consultant knows well. You have done the analysis. You have built the slide deck. You have rehearsed the presentation. And then you walk into the boardroom to present your findings to a CEO who has been running the company for twenty years and who does not care about your methodology, your frameworks, or your intellectual credentials. That CEO cares about one thing: can you help, or are you wasting their time?
No amount of preparation fully prepares you for that moment. The first time you do it, you are terrified. The tenth time, you are nervous. The hundredth time, you are calm. Not because the stakes have changed, but because you have been through the fire enough times to know that you will survive it.
That progression — terror, nervousness, calm — is the arc of a rite of passage. And it applies identically to performing magic.
The first time I performed a full set for an audience, I was vibrating with anxiety. My hands were doing things my brain had not authorized. My timing was off. My script, which sounded natural in the hotel room, sounded stilted and mechanical in front of real people. I got through it, but barely.
The fifth time was better. The fifteenth time was dramatically better. Not because my technique had improved that much in between — it had, but not proportionally. The improvement came from the testing itself. From the accumulation of rites of passage. From the fact that I had walked into rooms where failure was possible and walked out the other side.
What You Earn Through Testing
The specific thing you earn through rites of passage is not skill. Skill comes from practice. What you earn is something harder to name but easier to feel.
You earn the ability to be present on stage instead of being trapped inside your own head. When you have been tested enough times, the part of your brain that is screaming about what could go wrong gets quieter. It does not disappear — I still feel nerves before every performance — but it takes up less bandwidth. There is more room for awareness, for responsiveness, for the kind of in-the-moment adaptability that separates a performer from someone doing a rehearsed sequence.
You earn the ability to recover from mistakes. Every performer makes mistakes. The difference between a tested performer and an untested one is what happens next. The untested performer freezes, panics, tries to pretend the mistake did not happen. The tested performer acknowledges it — sometimes silently, sometimes openly — adjusts, and moves on. That resilience is not a personality trait. It is a muscle built through repeated exposure to the reality of live performance.
You earn the ability to read the room. No amount of theoretical study can teach you what a specific audience is feeling in a specific moment. That knowledge comes from being in rooms, reading reactions, making adjustments, and learning from the results. Every rite of passage — every performance, every test, every moment of exposure to a live audience — adds data points to your internal database. Over time, that database becomes intuition.
And perhaps most importantly, you earn the right to believe your own story. When someone asks me what I do and I tell them I am a performer and the co-founder of a magic company, there is a solidity behind those words that did not exist five years ago. That solidity is not from the business cards or the website or the company name. It is from the accumulation of moments where I stood in front of people, did the thing I said I could do, and lived through whatever happened.
The Test You Are Avoiding
If you are reading this and something resonates, I want to be direct about something. There is probably a test you are avoiding right now.
Maybe it is performing for one person for the first time. Maybe it is stepping up from close-up to stage. Maybe it is approaching a venue about a booking. Maybe it is submitting to a festival. Maybe it is performing in front of other magicians instead of just lay audiences.
Whatever it is, you know what it is. You have known for a while. And you have been telling yourself a version of the same story I told myself for months: not yet. Not ready. More practice. More preparation. Soon.
Here is what I learned, and what I wish someone had told me earlier: you will never feel ready. Readiness is not a feeling. It is a decision. You decide you are ready by going. The feeling comes after, not before.
That does not mean you go unprepared. It does not mean you walk on stage with half-learned routines and a prayer. The preparation matters enormously. But at some point, the preparation is done and the only thing left is the test. And the test is not optional. It is the thing that turns all those hours of practice into something real.
The Ongoing Rite
One of the things that surprised me most about this journey is that the rites of passage never stop. I assumed there would be a point where I had been tested enough, where the legitimacy question would be settled once and for all. That has not happened. Each new level brings a new test. Each new audience, each new venue, each new context presents a version of the same fundamental question: can you do this?
When Adam Wilber and I founded Vulpine Creations, that was a rite of passage. When I put together my first thirty-minute show, that was a rite of passage. When I started incorporating magic into my keynote speaking, that was a rite of passage. Each one was terrifying in its own way. Each one changed me in ways I did not expect.
The legitimacy I was looking for was never going to come from a certificate, a diploma, or a certain number of practice hours logged. It was always going to come from the accumulated weight of moments where I chose to be tested.
That is the nature of a rite of passage. Nobody hands it to you. You walk into it. And what you find on the other side is not confidence — that word is too small. What you find is evidence. Evidence, gathered through experience, that you belong in the room you were afraid to enter.
That evidence is legitimacy. And it is earned one test at a time.