There is a passage in Matthew McConaughey’s memoir Greenlights that stopped me cold. He describes the process of writing the book — how it drew on thirty-five years of personal journals, diaries, and notes he had been keeping since he was a teenager. Thirty-five years of writing down what happened, what he thought about it, what he believed, what he questioned. Not for publication. Not for any external audience. Just for himself. A private record of a life examined.
When he sat down to write the book, he did not have to invent anything. He had thirty-five years of raw material. Stories, observations, aphorisms, arguments with himself, reflections on moments of failure and success. The book was not created from memory — it was assembled from documentation. The journals were his playbook.
That word — playbook — is mine, not his. But it captures something essential about what McConaughey was doing, and about what I have come to believe is one of the most important habits a performer can develop: the systematic collection of raw material.
Three Systems, One Principle
I have studied three very different approaches to gathering creative raw material, and they all converge on the same underlying principle: you cannot create from nothing. The quality of your output depends entirely on the quality of your input. What differs between the three approaches is the method of collection.
McConaughey’s approach is the journal. Daily, personal, reflective. He writes down what happened and what it meant. Over decades, this creates an enormous archive of lived experience — not just events, but interpretations of events. The journal captures not only “what I did” but “who I was when I did it.” This is invaluable material for a performer, because performance is ultimately about expressing a perspective, and a journal is a record of your perspective evolving over time.
Austin Kleon, in his trilogy that begins with Steal Like an Artist, describes a different system: the swipe file. Kleon’s approach is about collecting externally rather than internally. A swipe file is a systematic collection of things you find interesting, inspiring, or provocative — clippings, quotes, images, ideas, fragments of other people’s work that resonate with you. The swipe file is not a diary. It is a cabinet of curiosities. It does not record what you experienced. It records what you noticed.
Kleon’s argument is that every creative person is the sum of their influences, and the swipe file is the tool that makes those influences accessible. When you need inspiration, you do not stare at a blank page. You open the file and browse. The juxtaposition of unrelated items — a newspaper clipping next to a photograph next to a line from a poem — generates connections that you would never have made through deliberate thinking.
The third approach is the oldest: the oral tradition. Before journals, before swipe files, before writing of any kind, storytellers carried their material in their heads. They memorized hundreds of tales, each one refined through countless retellings. Their archive was their memory, and their memory was trained by the practice of constant telling.
The oral tradition did not just preserve stories — it curated them. A storyteller who could remember a thousand tales would tell only the hundred that worked. The act of retelling was itself a form of editing. Stories that lost their power were dropped. Stories that gained power through retelling were polished and refined. The oral storyteller’s repertoire was a living, breathing collection of material that had been tested against audiences over and over.
Three systems. Three very different methods. But the principle is identical: gather more material than you will ever use, and trust that the right piece will be there when you need it.
My Own System
I came to this practice late, as I come to everything in magic — as an adult, after a career in strategy consulting where the closest equivalent was the competitive intelligence file. In consulting, you maintain a file of market data, competitor actions, trend analyses, and case studies. You do not consult this file to find “the answer.” You consult it to find the question you should be asking.
My performance collection works the same way. It is not organized by routine or by effect. It is organized by source.
I keep a digital document — a long, sprawling, deliberately unstructured file — where I record anything that strikes me. Passages from books. Anecdotes from conversations. Observations from my own performances. Historical facts that surprised me. Quotes that changed how I think about something. Details from biographies, scientific papers, philosophy, history, mythology.
Each entry gets a date and a one-line note about why I recorded it. Not analysis — just a breadcrumb. “Interesting contrast between public and private persona.” “This image could frame a card routine.” “The structure of this folk tale maps perfectly onto a three-phase effect.”
The entries are raw material. They are not finished products. Most of them will never become part of a performance. But the ones that do — the ones that connect with a routine I am building, or that solve a presentation problem I have been wrestling with — are worth more than a hundred hours of staring at a blank page trying to invent something from scratch.
Why Collection Matters More Than Creation
There is a common belief that creative work is about generating ideas. Sitting down, thinking hard, and producing something new. My experience has been the opposite. The hardest part of building a performance is not generating ideas. The hardest part is having the right raw material available when the idea arrives.
Ideas are cheap. Insights are everywhere. What is rare is the specific detail, the specific story, the specific image that transforms a vague idea into a concrete performance moment. And that specificity almost never comes from thinking. It comes from encountering — from reading something, hearing something, seeing something that connects with what you are trying to build.
McConaughey did not sit down one day and decide to write a book about green lights, yellow lights, and red lights. He wrote in his journals for thirty-five years, and then one day, reviewing decades of entries, the pattern emerged. The framework was not invented. It was discovered, hiding inside the accumulated material.
Kleon makes the same point with his concept of the creative family tree. You are the sum of your influences. Climb the tree — study your heroes, study your heroes’ heroes — and eventually you find yourself in the gaps between your influences. Your originality is not manufactured. It is the natural result of the unique combination of inputs that you have collected.
The oral tradition understood this instinctively. A storyteller did not invent stories. A storyteller collected them, refined them, and found the ones that resonated with their own voice and their own audience. The originality was in the selection and the telling, not in the invention.
The Accumulation Effect
Something happens when you maintain a collection over months and years. The material begins to talk to each other. An anecdote from a biography that meant nothing when you recorded it six months ago suddenly connects with a routine you are developing today. A historical detail you noted on a whim reveals itself as the perfect opening for a story you have been struggling to begin.
This is not mystical. It is combinatorial. The more raw material you have, the more possible combinations exist. And because the material comes from diverse sources — biographies, folk tales, science, history, personal observation, conversations — the combinations are unexpected. They cross boundaries that deliberate thinking would never cross.
I have found some of my best presentation ideas not by thinking about magic, but by reading about completely unrelated subjects and recognizing a structural parallel. A principle from behavioral economics maps onto audience management. A detail from the history of cartography illuminates how spectators navigate the geography of a performance. A paragraph from a poet’s journal explains, more precisely than any magic book, why silence after a magical moment is so powerful.
These connections only happen if the material is collected. If I had not written down the passage from the poet’s journal, I would never have made the connection to performance silence. The insight would have existed as a vague feeling — “I read something once about silence” — rather than as a specific, usable idea.
Practical Architecture
My system has three layers.
The first layer is the capture layer. This is the big, unstructured document where everything goes. No filtering, no judgment, no analysis. If it catches my attention, it goes in. The threshold for inclusion is low. Better to have too much material than to miss something that turns out to be valuable later.
The second layer is the connection layer. Every few weeks, I review recent entries and look for connections. Not forced connections — genuine resonances. Does this anecdote relate to a theme I have been exploring? Does this historical detail illuminate a principle I am working with? Does this observation suggest a new approach to a presentation problem? When I find a connection, I note it.
The third layer is the application layer. When I am actively building a new routine or revising an existing one, I search the collection for material that serves the work. Sometimes I find exactly what I need. More often, I find something adjacent — a detail that does not directly answer my question but that shifts my thinking in a productive direction.
This three-layer system is not elegant. It is not efficient. It generates far more material than I will ever use. But it ensures that when I need a story, a detail, a perspective, or an image, I have a deep well to draw from. And the act of maintaining the collection — of reading widely, noticing carefully, and recording faithfully — keeps my creative inputs fresh and diverse.
The Compounding Investment
McConaughey’s journals compounded over thirty-five years. By the time he sat down to write his book, he had an archive so rich that the challenge was not finding material but selecting from an abundance. The journal had become a flywheel, generating more creative potential with each passing year.
My collection is much younger. I have been maintaining it seriously for only a few years. But already, the compounding effect is visible. Early entries that seemed random now connect to themes I developed later. Passages I recorded without understanding why they mattered now illuminate problems I face in performance today. The collection is becoming more valuable over time, not less.
This is the argument for starting now, regardless of where you are in your creative development. Every entry you record today is an investment in future creative work that you cannot yet imagine. The material will be there when you need it, speaking to questions you have not yet learned to ask.
Gather widely. Record faithfully. Trust the accumulation. The playbook writes the plays.