I want to tell you about two different versions of myself, separated by about three years.
The first version — circa 2018, early in my journey — had a collection of roughly forty effects. Card tricks, coin routines, mentalism pieces, a few stage effects, some close-up material. I was constantly adding to the collection. Every time I saw a new tutorial, read about a new effect, or discovered a new product, I felt the pull to acquire it, learn it, and add it to the pile. My logic was simple: more effects meant more variety, more variety meant more entertainment, more entertainment meant better performances.
The second version — maybe three years later — had pared that collection down to about fifteen effects. Five for close-up, five for stand-up, five for the keynote integration. And I was performing variations of those same fifteen effects at every show, for every audience, month after month.
The first version was constantly learning new material and rarely performing any of it well. The second version was rarely learning new material and performing the same set to a level that consistently created genuine reactions.
The shift between those two versions represents one of the most important mindset changes of my performing life.
The Collection Instinct
The impulse to collect effects is powerful, and I think it comes from a genuine place. When you are new to magic, every effect you learn feels like a revelation. Each one opens a new door, reveals a new possibility, expands your sense of what magic can do. The learning itself is exciting — that moment when a new technique clicks, when a new principle reveals itself, when something that seemed impossible becomes achievable in your hands.
I remember that feeling vividly. Sitting in a hotel room with my laptop, watching a tutorial, trying the move, failing, trying again, getting closer, and then — the moment it worked. That moment was addictive. And the natural response to that addiction was to chase it. Learn the next thing. And the next. And the next.
But here is what I did not understand during the collection phase: the excitement of learning a new effect is not the same as the excellence of performing it well. They are completely different experiences, and optimizing for one undermines the other.
Every new effect you learn competes with every existing effect for your practice time, your mental bandwidth, and your performance opportunities. Learn forty effects, and each one gets a fortieth of your total investment. Learn fifteen, and each one gets almost three times as much.
The math is simple. The psychology is not.
Why Amateurs Chase Variety
The amateur mindset — and I am using the word amateur descriptively, not pejoratively, because I was the amateur — chases variety for several reasons, and I think it is worth examining them honestly.
First, variety feels like progress. Learning a new effect gives you the sensation of moving forward. Your repertoire is growing. Your skill set is expanding. It feels like improvement even when it is not, because the metric you are tracking (number of effects known) is the wrong metric.
Second, variety solves the wrong problem. The amateur worries about boring their audience with repetition. If they perform for the same circle of friends and family repeatedly — which is often the case early in a performing career — they feel pressure to show something new each time. “You already saw that one” is the phrase every amateur dreads.
Third, variety avoids the difficult work. Mastering an effect — truly mastering it, to the point where the technical execution is invisible, the script is polished, the timing is perfect, and the effect creates genuine astonishment — is hard. It requires months of repetitive practice on the same material. Learning something new is more stimulating than polishing something old. The brain, left to its own devices, will choose stimulation over discipline every time.
Why Professionals Choose Depth
The professional mindset inverts the equation entirely. A professional performer plays the same set for different audiences. Each audience is seeing the material for the first time. There is no need for variety from the audience’s perspective because they have no basis for comparison. They have never seen your show before.
This frees the performer to invest deeply in a small number of effects. Instead of spreading their practice time across forty pieces, they concentrate it on fifteen. Instead of performing each effect a dozen times before moving on to the next new thing, they perform each effect hundreds of times. And it is in those hundreds of repetitions — in front of diverse audiences, in different venues, under varying conditions — that the material transforms from something you can do into something extraordinary.
I remember reading about this principle in the context of stand-up comedy, where the same dynamic applies. A comedian might spend a year developing a sixty-minute special. That is sixty minutes of material, polished through hundreds of performances, each one slightly different, each one teaching the comedian something about timing, about word choice, about where the laughs really live. The audience at the special sees it once. The comedian has performed it three hundred times. That is the gap that produces excellence.
Scott Alexander, whose work on stage performance I have studied extensively, describes a similar philosophy. His stand-up show was refined over thousands of performances. The same effects, the same structure, the same core material — performed for different audiences every time, getting better with each repetition.
The audience does not need variety. The audience needs excellence. And excellence comes from depth, not breadth.
The Practice Implications
When I shifted from the collection mindset to the depth mindset, the change in my practice was dramatic.
Instead of spending each practice session working on a different effect, I would spend an entire week on a single routine. Not learning it — I already knew it. Refining it. Finding the pause that needed to be half a second longer. Discovering the line that could be cut without losing meaning. Working on the handling until it was not just smooth but invisible.
This kind of deep practice is boring in the way that scales are boring for a musician. There is no thrill of discovery. There is no rush of learning something new. There is only the incremental, often invisible improvement that comes from the hundredth repetition, the two-hundredth, the five-hundredth.
But the cumulative effect of that boredom is mastery. And mastery feels nothing like boredom. Mastery feels like freedom. When you know your material so deeply that the technical execution requires zero conscious effort, your entire conscious mind is available for the performance. For reading the audience. For adjusting in real time. For being present in the moment rather than managing the mechanics.
That freedom is what the audience experiences as natural, effortless, extraordinary. It is the product of hundreds of hours of repetitive practice on the same material, invested by a performer who chose depth over breadth.
The Social Pressure Problem
The hardest part of the depth mindset is social, not technical. If you have friends and family who have seen your show, they expect new material. If you have colleagues in the magic community who follow your work, they notice when your set does not change. If you are the kind of person — and I am this kind of person — who gets bored easily and craves novelty, the discipline of performing the same set for months is genuinely difficult.
I handle this in a few ways.
First, I remind myself that my audience is not my friends and family. My audience is the corporate group that has never seen me before. They are the ones the show is for. And they need my best material, not my newest material.
Second, I make a distinction between the performance set and the development set. The performance set is the material I take to paid shows — polished, tested, reliable. The development set is the material I am working on in practice and testing in low-stakes environments. The development set feeds into the performance set over time, but only when a new piece has been proven to be as strong as the piece it would replace.
Third, I accept the boredom as the price of excellence. Every professional in every field experiences this. The concert pianist plays the same concerto for the fiftieth time. The surgeon performs the same procedure for the thousandth time. The pilot executes the same approach for the ten-thousandth time. The boredom is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that you are investing at a professional level.
When to Add New Material
I am not arguing against ever learning new material. That would be absurd. Growth requires new challenges, and new effects provide those challenges. The question is not whether to add new material. It is when and how.
I add new material when one of three conditions is met.
First, when a piece in the current set has reached its ceiling. After hundreds of performances, I have found everything there is to find in it. The improvement curve has flatlined. At that point, a new piece provides the fresh challenge my practice needs.
Second, when I encounter an effect that is so perfectly aligned with my performing identity, my audience, and my show structure that it demands inclusion. These effects are rare. Most new effects I encounter are interesting but not necessary. The ones that demand inclusion are the ones where I can immediately feel how they would elevate the show as a whole.
Third, when the performing context changes. A new keynote topic, a new type of audience, a new venue requirement. These shifts sometimes call for material that my current set does not include.
In all three cases, the new material goes through a development process before it enters the performance set. Practice, rehearsal, low-stakes testing, refinement, more testing, and only then — only when it has been proven to be as strong as the piece it replaces — does it earn a place in the show.
The Mindset Behind the Mindset
At a deeper level, the shift from “perform different tricks for the same people” to “perform the same tricks for different people” reflects a change in what you value as a performer.
The collection mindset values novelty. The mastery mindset values impact. The collection mindset asks, “What else can I do?” The mastery mindset asks, “How well can I do what I already do?”
Both questions are valid at different stages of development. Early in the journey, when you are discovering what you love and building a foundation of skills, the collection phase is necessary and valuable. You need breadth before you can choose depth. You need to explore before you can commit.
But at some point — and every performer reaches this point if they are honest with themselves — the exploration needs to give way to cultivation. The garden is planted. It is time to tend it, not to keep planting new seeds.
I still feel the pull of the collection instinct. I still see new effects and feel the rush of “I want to learn that.” I still browse magic retailers with the same enthusiasm I had when I bought my first deck of cards. The difference is that now I can recognize the pull for what it is — a craving for stimulation rather than a path to excellence — and choose accordingly.
The amateur in me wants forty effects. The professional in me knows that fifteen, performed at the highest level I am capable of, will create more genuine wonder than forty ever could.
Different tricks for the same people is a hobby. The same tricks for different people is a craft. And the distance between those two things is measured not in effects learned, but in depth achieved.