There are two stories I could tell about how magic changed my life, and both would be true. The first is the external story — the one that looks impressive on paper, the one that makes for a good conversation at dinner parties. The second is the internal story — the one that is harder to articulate, harder to see from the outside, and infinitely more important.
The external story goes like this: a strategy consultant discovers magic, goes deep, meets Adam Wilber, and together they co-found Vulpine Creations. A magic company. Products designed and manufactured. Sold internationally. Validated at conventions. A real business in an industry I did not even know existed five years earlier.
That story is real and it matters. But if that were the whole story, I would be a businessman who happens to sell magic products. And that is not what happened.
What happened is that practice changed me. Not the company. Not the products. Not the business meetings or the trade shows or the branding decisions. The thing that fundamentally altered how I think, how I perceive, how I process the world — that happened in hotel rooms at eleven o’clock at night, alone, with a deck of cards and nowhere to go.
The External Transformation
Let me give the external story its due, because it is genuinely remarkable when I step back and look at it.
Before magic, I was a strategy and innovation consultant. That was my identity. It was how I introduced myself, how I thought about my career, how I organized my days. I traveled constantly — two hundred nights a year in hotels — and my professional life was consumed by frameworks, analyses, stakeholder management, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being smart for a living in other people’s organizations.
After Vulpine Creations, I was still a consultant. But I was also something else. A co-founder of a magic company. A person who understood product design, manufacturing logistics, creative development, and the peculiar economics of selling to a niche community of passionate hobbyists and professionals.
The external transformation was real. My professional identity expanded. My network changed. The conversations I had at events shifted from corporate strategy to creative development. My calendar included trade shows and product launches alongside board meetings and strategy sessions. My LinkedIn profile, if I had updated it honestly, would have looked like it belonged to two different people.
Vulpine Creations gave me a title, a role, and a reason to take magic seriously as more than a hobby. When you co-found a company that designs and sells magic products, you cannot treat the craft casually. You have skin in the game. You have to understand what performers need, what audiences respond to, what makes an effect worth buying and what makes it gather dust in a drawer. The business forced me to engage with magic at a level that hobbyists never reach — not because I am more talented, but because the stakes were higher.
That external pressure was valuable. I would not minimize it.
But it was not transformative. Not in the deep sense. Not in the way that changes how you see yourself when you are alone and honest.
The Internal Transformation
The internal transformation is harder to describe because it happened in increments so small that I did not notice them individually. Each one was invisible. Together, they rebuilt me from the inside.
It started with attention. The first thing that practice changed was my ability to pay attention. Not in the vague, mindfulness-app sense. In the specific, concrete sense of being able to focus on a single physical action for an extended period without my mind drifting to email, to project deadlines, to the meeting I had tomorrow morning.
Before magic, my attention was fractured. That is not unusual for consultants. The job rewards rapid context-switching — jumping from one client to another, one industry to another, one problem to another. You develop a broad, shallow attention that is excellent for scanning landscapes and terrible for doing anything with sustained depth.
Practice broke that pattern. When you are working on a technique with a deck of cards, you cannot think about anything else. The physical demands are too precise, the feedback loops too immediate. If your attention wanders for even a second, you feel it in your hands. The card goes to the wrong place. The sequence breaks. The move that was flowing suddenly stutters.
Night after night in hotel rooms, I was training my attention the way an athlete trains a muscle. Not intentionally — I was just practicing magic. But the side effect was a rewiring of how I engage with focused tasks. After a few months, I noticed it bleeding into my consulting work. I could sit with a complex problem longer. I could read a dense report without reaching for my phone. I could listen to a client talk for twenty minutes and actually hear what they were saying rather than mentally composing my response.
This was not a Vulpine Creations benefit. This was a practice benefit. It happened in the solitude of the hotel room, with nobody watching and nothing at stake.
The Patience Rewiring
The second internal change was patience. Not patience as a virtue, but patience as a cognitive capacity.
Before magic, I was fast. Fast thinking, fast deciding, fast moving. Consulting rewards speed. The person who can synthesize information quickly and produce a recommendation before anyone else gets the credit, the promotion, the next engagement. My entire professional identity was built on being the fastest thinker in the room.
Practice taught me that speed is sometimes the enemy.
There is a particular experience that every beginner in magic knows. You watch a tutorial, you understand the concept, you try the technique, and it does not work. So you try again. It does not work. You try a third time. Still does not work. Your hands are not doing what your brain is telling them to do. The gap between understanding and execution is enormous.
The consulting instinct in that moment is to analyze the problem, develop a hypothesis, implement a solution, and iterate rapidly. Apply more intelligence. Think harder. Work faster.
But magic does not respond to intelligence or speed. It responds to repetition, to patience, to the willingness to fail the same way fifty times before something shifts in your muscle memory and the technique suddenly, inexplicably, works.
That experience — of being smart enough to understand something but not patient enough to execute it — was genuinely humbling. It is not a feeling that strategy consultants encounter often. We are accustomed to intellectual problems that yield to intellectual effort. Magic presented me with problems that yielded to something else entirely: time, repetition, and the willingness to be bad at something for longer than my ego wanted.
Over months and then years, that patience rewiring changed how I approach problems in every domain. I became more comfortable with not having answers. More tolerant of ambiguity. More willing to sit with a difficult situation and let it resolve on its own timeline rather than forcing a premature conclusion.
None of that came from running a business. It came from sitting alone with a deck of cards and accepting that tonight, this technique was not going to work. And that tomorrow, I would try again.
The Honesty Restructuring
The third internal change was the hardest to accept and the most valuable. Practice made me honest with myself in ways that nothing else in my life had managed.
Consulting, for all its intellectual rigor, is a profession where you can hide from your own limitations. You work in teams. You present polished deliverables. You manage perceptions. If you are not the best analyst, you can be the best communicator. If you are not the most creative thinker, you can be the most organized. There is always a way to position yourself so that your weaknesses are not the thing being evaluated.
Practice allows no such hiding. When you are alone in a hotel room with a deck of cards, there is no team to carry you, no presentation to polish, no perception to manage. There is just you and the technique. It works or it does not. You can do it or you cannot. And no amount of strategic positioning changes the reality of what your hands can and cannot do.
That enforced honesty was uncomfortable at first. I had spent years building a professional self-image that was carefully curated, strategically positioned, and selectively honest. Practice stripped all of that away and presented me with a version of myself that was raw, unfiltered, and frequently inadequate.
But over time, that honesty became liberating. I stopped pretending to myself about where I was in my development. I stopped inflating my abilities. I stopped avoiding the things I was bad at and started confronting them directly. And that habit — of honest self-assessment, of seeing clearly rather than seeing favorably — started showing up everywhere.
In business meetings, I became more direct about what I did not know. In strategic recommendations, I became more transparent about the limits of my analysis. In relationships, I became more willing to say what I actually thought rather than what seemed strategically optimal. The enforced honesty of practice became a general honesty that improved every part of my life.
The Distinction That Matters
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that Vulpine Creations does not matter. It matters enormously. The business gave me context, community, accountability, and a reason to take my craft seriously. It connected me with Adam, who challenges me creatively in ways I could not have anticipated. It gave me a professional identity within the magic world that opened doors and created opportunities.
But if Vulpine Creations had never happened — if Adam and I had never met, if the company had never been founded, if none of the external transformation had occurred — the internal transformation would still have happened. Because the internal transformation came from practice. From the nightly discipline of sitting down with difficult material and working through it. From the solitary confrontation with my own limitations. From the slow, patient, unglamorous process of building skill one repetition at a time.
The external transformation gave me a story to tell. The internal transformation gave me something to say.
What This Means for the Long Game
There is a tendency, especially among people who come to magic from other professional fields, to focus on the external metrics. The products designed, the shows booked, the connections made, the recognition received. Those things are not unimportant. They provide structure, motivation, and a sense of progress.
But they are not the thing.
The thing — the transformation that actually changes your life in ways that matter when the lights are off and nobody is watching — happens in practice. In the daily, repetitive, often tedious, sometimes frustrating process of working on something that does not yet work. In the patience of trying again tomorrow. In the honesty of admitting where you are. In the discipline of showing up when nobody cares whether you do or not.
I run a magic company with my partner Adam Wilber. That is the external fact. But the person who runs that company is fundamentally different from the consultant who bought a deck of cards in a hotel room years ago. Not because of the company. Because of the thousands of hours between then and now. Hours spent alone, working, failing, adjusting, improving. Hours that nobody saw and nobody will ever see.
Those hours are the real story. The company is what the world sees. The practice is what changed me.
If you are on a similar path — if you are an adult who picked up this craft and is trying to figure out where it fits in your life — let me offer this observation. The external milestones will come or they will not. The performances, the recognition, the business opportunities — those are partially in your control and partially a function of timing, luck, and circumstance.
But the internal transformation is entirely in your control. It happens every time you sit down and practice. Every single time. Whether anyone is watching or not. Whether anyone cares or not. Whether anyone ever knows or not.
That is the transformation that matters. And it is available to anyone with a deck of cards and the willingness to be changed by the process of working with it.