It happened at a corporate event in Salzburg. I had just finished a keynote that incorporated some mentalism, and during the networking session afterward, a young consultant — maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven — approached me. He was not interested in the strategy content of the talk. He wanted to know about the magic.
Specifically, he wanted to know how I had started. He had been playing with cards for a few months, he told me, and he was stuck. He could not get past the basics. He watched tutorials online, practiced when he had time, but felt like he was going in circles. He did not know what to focus on. He did not know whether what he was doing was even right. He just kept repeating the same few things and hoping something would click.
I recognized everything he was describing. Every frustration, every plateau, every moment of confused effort. I had lived all of it. I was living some of it still.
Without planning to, without thinking about it strategically, I spent the next forty minutes talking to him. Not about specific techniques — that would have been the wrong thing to share and the wrong way to help. I talked about practice structure. About how to organize a session. About where to put your hardest material and why. About the difference between practicing what you can already do and practicing what you cannot yet do. About patience, and the illusion of readiness, and the terror of performing for someone for the first time.
He listened with an intensity I recognized. It was the intensity of someone who has been struggling alone and has just discovered that someone else has struggled with the same things.
When we parted, he thanked me in a way that felt disproportionate to what I had actually done. I had not taught him a single technique. I had not demonstrated anything. I had just shared what I had learned about the process of learning.
I drove back to Vienna that night and could not stop thinking about the conversation. Not because it was remarkable. Because of how it made me feel.
The Unexpected Discovery
Here is what I did not expect: teaching clarifies thinking.
Every concept I had discussed with that young consultant — practice structure, energy management, the towards-and-away-from bias, the hierarchy of testing — I had learned through my own experience and through studying the source material that has shaped my approach. But there is a difference between knowing something and explaining it. The act of explaining forces you to organize what you know, to find the logical structure beneath the intuitive understanding, to identify the gaps in your own comprehension.
That night in the car, I realized that several things I thought I understood, I only partially understood. They worked for me, but I could not articulate why they worked. The process of trying to explain them to someone else had exposed the holes in my understanding — not in the techniques themselves, but in my framework for thinking about practice and performance.
This is something Austin Kleon discusses in Steal Like an Artist — the idea that teaching is one of the most powerful forms of learning. When you try to teach what you know, you discover what you do not know. The act of explanation is an act of consolidation. It forces clarity.
I had stumbled into this accidentally. I had not set out to mentor anyone. I had simply responded to a question from someone who reminded me of myself a few years earlier. But the effect on my own understanding was immediate and significant.
Why I Had Resisted
If I am honest, there was a period where the idea of mentoring or teaching felt presumptuous. Who was I to guide anyone? I was not a lifelong magician. I did not grow up in this world. I was a strategy consultant who fell into magic as an adult. My experience, while real, was measured in years, not decades. The idea that I had something to offer someone else felt like overstepping.
That resistance, I now understand, was rooted in a misunderstanding of what mentoring actually is.
I had been thinking of mentoring as expertise transmission — the master passing down the secret knowledge to the apprentice. In that model, you need to be a master first. You need to know everything. You need to have reached a level of achievement that justifies the act of teaching.
But that model is wrong. Or at least, it is incomplete.
What the young consultant in Salzburg needed was not a master. He needed someone who had been where he was, recently enough to remember what it felt like, and who had found some paths through the confusion. He did not need thirty years of experience. He needed three years of experience, honestly shared.
That realization dissolved the resistance. I was not pretending to be something I was not. I was sharing what I had learned from a position of honest imperfection. Here is what I tried, here is what worked, here is what did not, here is what I wish I had known earlier. That is not expertise. That is generosity.
The Second Conversation, and the Third
After Salzburg, it started happening more frequently. At events, at gatherings, through Vulpine Creations connections. People who were on a similar path — often adults who had come to magic later in life, often professionals from other fields — would find out about my journey and want to talk.
The conversations followed a pattern. They would start with technique questions — what should I practice, what order should I learn things in, which tutorials are good. And I would redirect, gently, toward the structural questions. How are you organizing your practice time? What are you spending your energy on? Are you working on what is hard or on what is comfortable?
Almost invariably, their eyes would widen at some point in the conversation. The same moment. The moment when they realized that the problem was not their lack of talent or their choice of tutorial. The problem was their practice structure. They had been doing what everyone does — starting with the easy stuff, spending most of their time on maintenance, avoiding the difficult material until they were too tired to tackle it — and wondering why they were not improving.
Watching that realization land in someone else was unexpectedly moving. I remembered exactly when it had landed in me. The frustration of those early months when progress felt random and unpredictable. The gradual dawning that the intuitive approach was systematically wrong. The shift that occurred when I reorganized my practice and started putting the hardest material first.
Each of these conversations reinforced my own understanding. Each one forced me to articulate something I had been doing unconsciously. Each one made me a better practitioner, not by teaching me new techniques, but by deepening my grasp of the principles underneath the techniques.
What Mentoring Actually Is
After enough of these conversations, I started to develop a clearer sense of what mentoring looks like in this context. It is not instruction. I do not teach people how to do specific effects. That would be both presumptuous and counterproductive — they need to find their own relationship with the material, the same way I found mine.
What I offer instead is structure. A way of thinking about practice that is more effective than the default. A framework for self-assessment that is more honest than the one most people use. A set of questions that, if asked regularly, keep you oriented toward growth rather than maintenance.
And perhaps most importantly, I offer the validation that comes from shared experience. The simple acknowledgment that the struggles are normal. That the plateaus are real. That the fear of performing is universal. That the feeling of not being good enough does not go away — it just becomes manageable.
That last point matters more than I expected. So many of the people I talk to are carrying a quiet conviction that they are uniquely bad at this. That everyone else is progressing faster. That the difficulties they face are evidence of insufficient talent rather than the normal experience of learning a difficult skill.
Telling them that I went through exactly the same thing — and that the frustration is not a sign that something is wrong but a sign that they are engaged in genuine growth — that information changes things. Not because it makes the work easier. Because it makes the difficulty meaningful instead of demoralizing.
How It Changed My Purpose
Before Salzburg, my relationship with magic was primarily personal. I practiced for myself. I performed for the experience. I built Vulpine Creations because the business opportunity was there and because Adam and I shared a creative vision. My purpose in magic was self-oriented: get better, build things, perform.
After I started having those mentoring conversations, something shifted in my sense of purpose. The self-oriented goals did not disappear. I still want to improve. I still want to create. I still want to perform at a higher level than I did last year. But a new dimension appeared alongside those goals.
I started caring about the path. Not just my path — the path itself. The journey of an adult learner coming to magic with no background, no pedigree, no childhood foundation. The specific challenges and specific advantages of that starting position. The things that work for people like us and the things that do not.
I realized that this path — the adult learner path, the outsider path, the systematic-thinker-meets-ancient-art path — is underserved. Most of the teaching in magic is aimed at either complete beginners (here is how you do this trick) or advanced practitioners (here is a sophisticated variation on a classic technique). The middle ground — how to think about practice, how to structure your development, how to navigate the psychological challenges of learning a performance art as an adult — is largely unaddressed.
That middle ground is where I live. It is where my experience is most relevant. And it is where the conversations that matter most tend to happen.
The Reciprocal Gift
There is a principle I have observed in every mentoring relationship I have been part of, whether I was the mentor or the person being mentored. The gift flows both ways.
When I share what I have learned about practice structure with someone who is struggling, I am giving them a framework that took me years to develop. That has value. But what they give me in return is equally valuable: they give me the reminder of why this matters. They give me the beginner’s perspective that I have already lost. They show me the assumptions I have stopped questioning. They ask the obvious questions that are not obvious at all.
Every conversation with someone earlier on the path refreshes my own engagement with the craft. It reconnects me with the excitement of discovery, the frustration of not-yet, the specific thrill of the first time something works. Those feelings fade with experience. Mentoring brings them back.
And there is something else. Something harder to articulate but deeply real.
When you help someone navigate a difficulty that you once faced, you complete a circle. The struggle you went through becomes meaningful in a new way. It was not just something you endured for your own benefit. It was preparation for this moment — the moment where your experience becomes useful to someone else.
That completion changes the character of the original struggle. It retroactively adds purpose. The frustrating months of disorganized practice, the embarrassing early performances, the long stretches of invisible progress — all of it becomes source material for helping someone else. All of it acquires a second purpose that it did not have when you were living through it.
The Decision That Was Not a Decision
I want to be honest about something: I never made a conscious decision to start mentoring. There was no strategic plan, no business case, no brand-building intention. It happened organically, through conversations that began because someone asked a question and I had something honest to say in response.
But looking back, the cumulative effect of those conversations has been one of the most significant developments in my relationship with magic. It shifted me from a person who practices and performs to a person who practices, performs, and shares. And that third element — the sharing — has deepened the first two in ways I could not have predicted.
If you are at a point in your own journey where you have accumulated some experience and some insight, let me suggest this: the next time someone asks you how you started, resist the urge to give a quick answer and move on. Sit with them. Share what you actually learned. Talk about the mistakes, the frustrations, the things that worked and the things that did not.
You might discover, as I did, that the act of sharing is not a drain on your own development. It is a catalyst for it. And the purpose you find in helping someone else navigate the same path you are still walking — that purpose is not a distraction from the work. It is part of the work. Maybe the most important part.