I know the room. I can picture it exactly. A business hotel somewhere in Austria — one of those interchangeable rooms with the white duvet, the wall-mounted television, the desk lamp that was never quite bright enough. I was on a consulting trip, another night in another city, another evening with nothing to do and nowhere to be.
The deck of cards was new. I had ordered it online a few days earlier — from ellusionist.com, because that was the website I had stumbled across while searching for something, anything, to occupy my hands during the two hundred nights a year I spent in places exactly like this. The laptop was open to a tutorial. The first tutorial. The one where you learn to hold the deck.
I did not know, sitting at that desk, that I was starting something that would change the trajectory of my life. That the deck of cards would lead to a rabbit hole, and the rabbit hole would lead to obsession, and the obsession would lead to studying the history of magic back to ancient Egypt, and that history would lead to mentalism, and mentalism would lead to meeting Adam Wilber, and meeting Adam would lead to co-founding Vulpine Creations, and all of it — every thread, every late night, every failure — would eventually weave itself into the person I am today.
I just wanted something to do with my hands.
If I could go back to that room and sit down across from that version of myself, here is what I would say.
You are going to be terrible for a long time. That is how it works.
Not terrible in the way you fear — dropped cards, exposed moves, embarrassing failures in front of people. Those will happen too. But the terribleness I am talking about is subtler. You are going to spend months learning things the wrong way. You are going to build habits that you will later have to dismantle. You are going to invest hundreds of hours in a practice approach that is systematically inefficient, and you will not realize it until you stumble across better methodology much later.
This is not a failure. This is the process. Everyone starts by doing it wrong. The autodidact’s journey — which is your journey, because you are learning this alone in hotel rooms, not in a classroom, not with a mentor, not with a community — is especially messy. You will make every beginner’s mistake. You will make some mistakes that beginners do not usually make because your analytical mind will lead you down paths that feel rational but are not.
The thing I want you to know is that every one of those mistakes is a lesson. Not a setback. A lesson. And the lessons that come from doing it wrong are more durable and more useful than the lessons that come from being told the right way.
The thing you hate about magic is the thing you will come to love.
Right now, you have a bad taste in your mouth about magic. That childhood experience with the clown in Austria left you thinking magic was silly, juvenile, something for kids’ birthday parties. You are approaching this deck of cards almost apologetically — as a hand exercise, a fidget, a way to kill time. Not as an art form. Not as a craft.
That will change. And it will change because you will discover the depth that exists beneath the surface. You will read about the cups and balls — an effect that has been performed for over two thousand years. You will learn about Seneca writing about conjurers in ancient Rome. You will discover the Beni Hassan paintings from 1900 BC. You will realize that magic is not a trick. It is one of the oldest performance traditions in human civilization.
And then you will discover the modern thinkers. Darwin Ortiz, who will teach you about the psychology of impossibility. Derren Brown, who will demolish your assumptions about what mentalism can be. Ken Weber, who will show you that entertainment is a discipline, not an accident. Joshua Jay, who will help you understand the difference between fooling someone and creating wonder.
The thing you hate right now — the surface-level impression of cheap tricks and corny patter — is a caricature. The reality beneath it is vast, rigorous, and deeply rewarding. Give it time.
You do not need to be young to start. But you need to start.
One of the voices in your head right now is saying: you are too old for this. Magic is something people learn as children. You are a grown man, a strategy consultant, sitting in a hotel room with a deck of cards. This is ridiculous.
That voice is wrong, and I want to be clear about exactly how wrong it is. Starting something new as an adult is not a disadvantage. It is a different kind of advantage. You bring analytical skills that a child does not have. You bring life experience that provides context and meaning. You bring the discipline of a professional who understands what it takes to build competency in a complex domain.
You also bring something else: a fresh perspective. The people who started magic as children have familiarity. They grew up inside the craft. They know things intuitively that you will have to learn explicitly. But they also have blind spots — assumptions they have never questioned because they absorbed them before they had the critical thinking skills to evaluate them. You will question everything, because everything is new to you. And some of those questions will lead to insights that the lifelong practitioners missed.
The “starting from scratch” angle is not a weakness. It is the most relatable thing about you. Most people have never performed magic. Most people have never stood on a stage. Most people have felt the fear of doing something new, in public, badly. Your journey is their journey. Your struggles are their struggles. Your voice will resonate precisely because it comes from someone who started where they are.
The hotel room is your studio. Treat it that way.
You will spend more hours practicing in hotel rooms than you can currently imagine. Late at night, after a day of consulting work, with your cards spread out on the desk and a tutorial playing on your laptop. This will feel lonely sometimes. It will feel like you are the only person in the world who is doing this.
You are not. But even if you were, the hotel room is where the craft gets built. Not on stage. Not in front of audiences. In the quiet, solitary, repetitive work of building skills one session at a time. The hotel room is your studio. The desk is your workbench. The mirror in the bathroom is your audience.
Respect the space. Respect the time. Do not apologize for spending your evenings this way. The people who achieve mastery in any domain are the people who find a way to practice consistently, regardless of their circumstances. Your circumstances happen to include two hundred nights a year in hotel rooms. That is not a limitation. It is an opportunity that most aspiring performers would envy.
You will meet a person who changes everything.
You do not know Adam Wilber yet. You will meet him at an event in London — Xcite Festival, an event you are organizing. You will invite him as a keynote speaker because of his work in magic, and you will discover that he is not just talented but generous, not just creative but disciplined, not just a magician but a genuine partner in the way you think about craft, business, and the intersection of the two.
The partnership you will build with Adam — Vulpine Creations — will force you to take your performing seriously. You will put together your first thirty-minute show because you run a magic company and you need to be able to perform. That show will be rough. It will also be the most important thing you have ever done, because it will close the gap between studying magic and doing magic.
Find Adam early. Or rather, create the conditions for Adam to find you. Put yourself in rooms where talented, passionate people gather. The partnerships that change your life are not planned. They are encountered. But you have to be in motion for the encounter to happen.
The consulting skills transfer more than you think.
You are going to spend a long time thinking of magic and consulting as separate worlds. One is your career. The other is your hobby. One is serious. The other is play.
That separation is false, and you will eventually discover it. The skills you have built as a strategy consultant — the ability to analyze complex systems, to identify the leverage points that produce disproportionate results, to structure thinking, to communicate clearly, to read a room, to manage stakeholder expectations — all of them transfer directly to magic and performance.
Your analytical approach to practice methodology will give you an edge over performers who practice intuitively. Your consulting framework for evaluating strategy — persist, pivot, or concede — will help you make decisions about your repertoire that emotion-driven performers struggle with. Your experience with presentations and keynote speaking will give you a head start on stage presence that pure card magicians often lack.
You are not coming to magic empty-handed. You are coming with a toolkit that most magicians never develop. Trust that toolkit. Use it. Let it shape your unique approach to the craft.
The bad shows are more valuable than the good ones.
You are going to have bad shows. Performances where the timing is off, where the audience is disengaged, where a trick goes wrong, where your patter falls flat, where you walk offstage feeling like a fraud. These shows will be painful. You will want to forget them.
Do not forget them. Study them. They are the most information-dense performances you will ever have. A good show tells you what works. A bad show tells you what needs to change. And what needs to change is always more valuable than what works, because what works is already handled. What needs to change is the frontier of growth.
Write down what went wrong after every bad show. Not to punish yourself. To learn. The bad shows are tuition. They are expensive, uncomfortable, sometimes humiliating tuition. But they teach things that books and tutorials cannot. They teach you about yourself under pressure. About what your material actually does to real people in real time. About the gap between what you thought would work and what actually does.
You are going to want to quit. Do not.
There will be a night — more than one, actually — where you sit on the edge of a hotel bed and ask yourself what you are doing. You are a strategy consultant. You have a serious career. You are spending your evenings learning card tricks. Is this ridiculous? Is this a midlife crisis? Should you put the cards back in the drawer and focus on something productive?
The answer is no. And the reason the answer is no has nothing to do with magic specifically. It has to do with the fact that you have found something that engages you completely. Something that demands your best thinking, your deepest concentration, your most creative problem-solving. Something that challenges you in ways that consulting, for all its complexity, no longer does.
That engagement is rare. Most people never find it. The fact that you have found it — in a hotel room, by accident, with a deck of cards — is not ridiculous. It is a gift.
Do not quit. The journey you are starting tonight will take you places you cannot currently imagine. It will introduce you to people who will become important in your life. It will give you a craft that enriches your professional work, expands your sense of what is possible, and connects you to a tradition that stretches back thousands of years.
One last thing.
You are sitting at that desk right now, watching the tutorial, trying to figure out how to hold the deck properly. Your hands feel clumsy. The cards do not want to cooperate. The move that the instructor makes look effortless feels impossible in your fingers.
That feeling — the frustration, the clumsiness, the gap between what you see and what you can do — that feeling is the beginning. Not the obstacle. The beginning. It is the feeling that every master in every discipline felt on their first night with their instrument. It is the feeling that means something new is starting.
Stay with it. Stay with the frustration and the clumsiness and the late nights and the slow progress. Stay with the doubt and the self-consciousness and the voice that says you are too old, too analytical, too much of a beginner.
Because on the other side of all of that — on the other side of thousands of hours of practice, hundreds of performances, dozens of failures, and a handful of moments that make everything worth it — there is a version of you that you cannot currently imagine. A version who stands in front of rooms full of strangers and creates wonder. A version who co-founded a magic company. A version who integrated an ancient art form into a modern career and found, in the process, a part of himself he did not know was missing.
That version is waiting. He starts here. Tonight. In this room. With this deck of cards.
Pick them up.
Begin.