There is a fantasy about practice that circulates in every discipline, and it goes something like this: the dedicated practitioner sits down, enters a state of focused concentration, works diligently on their craft, experiences a satisfying progression of improvement, and rises from the session feeling fulfilled and closer to mastery.
That fantasy is approximately five percent accurate.
The other ninety-five percent of practice — the part that nobody writes about because it does not make a good story — feels nothing like that. It feels like sitting in a hotel room in Linz at ten-thirty at night, staring at a deck of cards, and wondering whether what you are doing is accomplishing anything at all.
I want to write honestly about what thousands of hours of practice actually feel like. Not the highlight reel. Not the breakthrough moments. The actual, lived experience of spending an extraordinary amount of time on a single discipline over the course of years.
The First Hundred Hours: Confusion
When I first picked up a deck of cards, the feeling was overwhelmingly confusion. Not the exciting kind of confusion that drives curiosity. The disorienting kind that makes you question whether you are doing the right thing at all.
I would watch a tutorial on my laptop, pause it, try to reproduce what I had just seen, fail, rewind, watch again, try again, fail differently, rewind, watch again. This cycle could repeat twenty or thirty times for a single technique. And the failure was not dramatic — it was quiet and incremental. My hands would do something that looked sort of right but was not quite right, and I could not figure out what the difference was between sort of right and actually right.
The confusion was compounded by not knowing what I did not know. I did not have a map of the territory. I did not know which skills mattered and which were optional. I did not know whether the thing I was struggling with was foundational or peripheral. I was making decisions about how to spend my practice time without any framework for evaluating those decisions.
Looking back, the first hundred hours were less about building skill and more about building a mental model. I was learning what the landscape looked like. What the components were. How they related to each other. The actual skill development during that period was minimal. What I was really doing was creating the cognitive infrastructure that would eventually allow skill development to happen.
That distinction is important because those first hundred hours felt mostly wasted while I was living them. I felt like I should have been further along. I compared myself to people on YouTube who made everything look easy and concluded that something was wrong with me, with my hands, with my coordination, with my starting point.
Nothing was wrong. A hundred hours of confusion is exactly what beginning a complex skill feels like. I just did not know that at the time.
Hours One Hundred to Five Hundred: Grinding
The confusion phase eventually gives way to something I can only describe as grinding. You know what you need to work on. You have a general sense of what good looks like. And you are closing the gap between where you are and where good is, one repetition at a time.
This phase is the least romantic and the most important. It is hundreds of hours of doing the same things over and over, with variations so small that they are invisible to anyone watching but enormous to the person doing them. A slight adjustment in grip. A marginal change in timing. A fractional shift in the angle of a hand.
The grinding phase feels like nothing. That is its defining characteristic. There are no breakthroughs. There are no aha moments. There are just sessions. One after another. In hotel rooms in Vienna, in Graz, in Innsbruck, in Salzburg. The same deck of cards, the same desk, the same tutorial paused on the same frame, the same technique attempted for the hundredth time or the two hundredth time or the five hundredth time.
During this phase, I developed a deep familiarity with boredom. Not the restless boredom of having nothing to do, but the particular boredom of doing something that requires attention but does not provide stimulation. My hands were busy. My mind was partially engaged. But the emotional experience was flat. No excitement, no frustration, no satisfaction. Just the steady, neutral hum of work being done.
I want to be honest about something: there were many nights during this phase where I questioned the entire enterprise. Not dramatically — I did not have a crisis of faith. I just sat with a quiet doubt. Is this going anywhere? Am I getting better? Would I even know if I was not? The doubt was not paralyzing. It was more like background noise. A low-frequency hum beneath the practice, always there, never quite loud enough to stop me, never quite quiet enough to ignore.
Hours Five Hundred to Two Thousand: Islands of Clarity
Something shifts around the five-hundred-hour mark. I cannot pinpoint exactly when it happened because the shift is not an event. It is a gradual change in the texture of practice.
The grinding does not stop. You are still doing repetitions, still making micro-adjustments, still spending most of your time in the neutral zone of disciplined work. But now, occasionally, something else happens. Moments of clarity. Brief windows where everything clicks and the technique flows without conscious effort, where your hands do exactly what they are supposed to do and you can feel, viscerally, the difference between good and everything that came before it.
These moments are brief. Seconds, sometimes. A single execution that is qualitatively different from the hundreds that preceded it. And then it is gone, and you are back to grinding, trying to reproduce what just happened without knowing exactly what you did differently.
But the moments accumulate. They become more frequent. The gap between them shrinks. And gradually, the technique that was once a conscious, effortful, attention-demanding process becomes something closer to automatic. Not fully automatic — the finest work always requires attention — but automatic enough that you can do it while thinking about something else. While thinking about your script, your audience, your timing, your emotional arc.
This phase is where practice starts to feel rewarding. Not because the work gets easier — it does not. But because the rewards become tangible. You can feel yourself improving. You can hear it in the sound the cards make. You can see it in the smoothness of your hands. You can experience it in the reactions of the rare person you perform for.
The doubt does not disappear. But it changes character. It shifts from “is this going anywhere?” to “how far can this go?” That is a fundamentally different question, and it changes the emotional tone of practice from endurance to exploration.
The Plateau Experience
I need to talk about plateaus because they are the feature of long-term practice that nobody adequately prepares you for.
A plateau is a period where you are practicing consistently, putting in the hours, doing the work, and seeing no measurable improvement. Weeks of practice. Sometimes months. The technique does not get better. It does not get worse. It just stays where it is, immovable, unresponsive to effort.
I have experienced multiple plateaus, and they are each terrible in their own way. The first one is terrible because you do not know it is a plateau. You think you have stopped improving permanently. You think you have hit your ceiling. You think this is as good as you are going to get.
The second one is terrible because you do know it is a plateau, and that knowledge does not make it feel any better. You tell yourself: this is normal, this is part of the process, the breakthrough will come. And that is all true. But knowing it is true while living through weeks of stagnation is an entirely different experience from reading about it in a blog post.
The plateau is where most people quit. Not dramatically. Not by throwing their cards in the trash and declaring magic dead. They quit by gradually reducing their practice frequency. By skipping a night, then two, then a week. By finding other things to fill the time. By telling themselves they will get back to it when they feel inspired again.
The inspiration does not come. The practice does not resume. The deck of cards sits in the drawer. The journey ends.
I survived my plateaus for one reason: I had internalized a concept from the practice methodology research that I had been studying. The concept is that plateaus are not pauses in growth. They are phases of consolidation. The brain is reorganizing. The neural pathways are being reinforced and refined. Growth is happening — it is just happening below the level of conscious awareness. The visible improvement will come. But it will come on its own schedule, not yours.
Believing that — truly believing it, in the gut, during the twentieth consecutive practice session with no visible progress — is one of the hardest things about long-term practice. It is an act of faith supported by evidence but experienced as uncertainty.
The Thousand-Hour Shift
Somewhere around the thousand-hour mark, something changes that I did not anticipate. Practice stops being something you do and starts being something you are.
I do not mean that metaphorically. I mean that the activity of practicing becomes so integrated into your daily life that it no longer requires a decision. You do not decide to practice the way you decide to go to the gym or decide to read a book. You practice the way you brush your teeth. It is just what happens at that time of day, in that place, with that deck of cards.
This integration changes the emotional experience of practice profoundly. The question of motivation disappears. Not because you are always motivated — you are not. But because motivation is no longer the prerequisite for action. You practice when you are motivated and you practice when you are not. You practice when you are tired and when you are energized. You practice when you feel like it and when you do not feel like it.
The practice becomes load-bearing. It holds up part of your psychological architecture. Skip it, and something feels off. Not dramatically wrong. Just off. Like a room where the furniture has been rearranged slightly. Everything is functional, but nothing feels quite right.
I did not set out to build this dependency. It developed naturally, over time, as a consequence of consistent repetition. And I hesitate to call it dependency because that word implies something unhealthy. It is more like an equilibrium. Practice is part of the equilibrium of my days. Remove it, and the system shifts.
What Nobody Tells You About the Late Hours
Here is the thing about thousands of hours of practice that nobody tells you, because it does not fit the narrative of grit and determination: most of the hours are unremarkable. They are neither good nor bad. They are not inspiring and they are not miserable. They are just hours.
You sit down. You work. You get up. You go to bed. Tomorrow you do it again. The emotional intensity that people imagine when they hear about dedicated practice — the fierce concentration, the passionate commitment, the burning desire — that exists for maybe ten percent of the time. The other ninety percent is just showing up.
And showing up is the whole thing. Not the passionate showing up. Not the inspired showing up. Just the showing up. The quiet, undramatic act of taking the cards out of the box and starting to work, night after night, in hotels and apartments and borrowed spaces, with nobody watching and nobody caring and nobody ever going to know whether you practiced tonight or watched television instead.
That is what thousands of hours of practice actually feels like. It feels like a very long Tuesday. With occasional moments of transcendence — moments where everything connects and you glimpse what mastery might look like from the inside — scattered across an ocean of ordinary effort.
The transcendent moments are real. They are not exaggerated. When a technique clicks and you can feel the transformation from doing it to being it, the feeling is genuinely extraordinary. It is a kind of physical joy that I have not found in any other activity. Your hands know something your mind cannot articulate. Your body has learned something that exists below language.
But those moments are not the practice. They are the punctuation. The practice is the sentences between the punctuation marks. The long, unremarkable sentences where nothing special happens and nothing special is supposed to happen. Where the only thing that matters is that you are there, doing the work, adding another hour to the total.
The Thousand Hours You Carry
I carry those hours with me every time I perform. Not as a number. Not as a badge of honor. As a foundation.
When I stand in front of people and do what I do, every technique, every transition, every moment of apparent ease is sitting on top of thousands of hours of unremarkable practice. Hours of confusion, hours of grinding, hours of plateau, hours of doubt. Hours where the only witness was a hotel room desk lamp and the only audience was my own reflection in the window.
Those hours are invisible to the audience. They should be invisible. The point of practice is to make the work disappear, to make the difficult look easy, to make the thousands of hours look like natural ability.
But I know they are there. And knowing they are there is the foundation of whatever confidence I carry on stage. Not confidence in my talent — I am not sure I have unusual talent. Confidence in my preparation. In the sheer accumulation of repetitions, adjustments, failures, and micro-improvements that together constitute what thousands of hours of practice actually is.
It is not glamorous. It is not inspiring, most of the time. It is not the story that makes for good social media content.
But it is the thing that works. The only thing, in my experience, that actually works. Not the technique itself. Not the tutorials. Not the books. The hours. The showing up. The long, unremarkable Tuesday that somehow, through mechanisms I do not fully understand and probably never will, transforms you from someone who cannot do something into someone who can.