There is a number that haunts me. Twenty-six years.
That is how long some of the most celebrated routines in magic took from initial concept to final performance. Not twenty-six days. Not twenty-six months. Twenty-six years of thinking, tinkering, shelving, revisiting, reworking, abandoning, returning, and finally — finally — staging the piece.
I came across this idea while reading Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, which references the development timelines of performers like Teller, whose creative process famously spans years and sometimes decades. The gap between having an idea and putting it on stage is not a bug in the creative process. It is a feature. And understanding this changed my relationship with patience in a way that years of management consulting never did.
The Pressure to Produce
When I started building material for my first thirty-minute show, I gave myself a timeline. Six weeks. I had an event coming up — a corporate function in Vienna where I needed to perform — and I treated the preparation like a consulting project. Define the deliverable. Set the milestone. Execute.
Six weeks. That was my plan for creating, scripting, rehearsing, and polishing a half-hour of original magic performance. I was going to do in six weeks what some of the greatest performers in history spent years developing.
The arrogance of that timeline is embarrassing in retrospect. But I did not know better, and more importantly, I was operating with a business mindset where speed of delivery is a virtue. In consulting, if you take twenty-six years to deliver a strategy recommendation, you do not get a standing ovation. You get fired.
I hit my six-week deadline. I performed the show. It was adequate. It was not good. The effects worked. The patter was serviceable. The audience was polite. But there was no magic in it — not the sleight-of-hand kind, which was fine, but the experiential kind, which was not. The show functioned. It did not live.
What Time Does That Speed Cannot
There is a particular quality that long-developed material has, and it is almost impossible to define but immediately recognizable. A routine that has been lived with for years has a depth, a naturalness, a sense of inevitability that no amount of concentrated short-term work can produce.
Part of this is technical. When you have been working on a piece for years, the handling becomes so deeply ingrained that it is truly invisible. You do not think about it. You do not manage it. It exists below the level of conscious attention, freeing your mind entirely for performance, for connection, for being present with the audience.
But the deeper reason is creative. When an idea sits with you for a long time, it undergoes a process of unconscious refinement that no deliberate effort can replicate. You carry it around in the back of your mind. You encounter other ideas, other performances, other experiences that connect to it in unexpected ways. You see a film and think, “That scene does what I want my routine to do.” You overhear a conversation and think, “That phrase captures the feeling I’ve been trying to create.” You have a personal experience and think, “That is the story this piece has been waiting for.”
None of this can be forced. None of this can be scheduled. It happens on its own timeline, and the timeline is measured in months and years, not days and weeks.
McCabe advocates for maintaining a notebook of unfinished ideas — half-formed concepts, interesting fragments, combinations that have not yet revealed their final shape. The notebook is not a to-do list. It is a garden where ideas grow at their own pace. The discipline is in capturing the ideas, not in forcing them to completion.
The Notebook That Changed My Practice
After reading about this long-development approach, I started keeping a dedicated notebook for performance ideas. Not a practice journal — I already had one of those. A separate book specifically for ideas that were not ready.
I write in it almost every day. Sometimes a phrase. Sometimes a concept. Sometimes a sketch of a sequence. Sometimes just a feeling — “the moment when someone realizes something impossible has happened, and their face changes before they can control it.” That is an actual entry from about two years ago. It has no routine attached to it. It has no method. It has no script. But it captures something I want to create, and it is sitting in the notebook, waiting.
Some entries have been in that notebook for years without resolution. Others connected to other entries within weeks and became the seeds of routines I now perform regularly. One of the best pieces in my current keynote set came from combining a half-idea I had noted in a hotel room in Innsbruck with an observation I had made at a conference in London eighteen months later. Neither idea was complete on its own. Together, they became something worth performing.
If I had forced either idea to completion when I first had it, it would have been adequate. By letting both ideas age, and by being alert for the connection between them, the result was something much better than adequate. It was something that felt inevitable — like the piece had always existed and I had simply been waiting to discover it.
The Consulting Tension
There is a real tension here for someone who comes to creative work from a results-oriented professional background. In consulting, unfinished work is a liability. An incomplete deliverable is a missed deadline. A half-formed strategy is not a “seed” — it is a failure.
I have had to actively retrain my instincts. When I note an idea and it does not immediately resolve into a performable routine, my consulting brain registers that as a problem. Something is stuck. Something needs to be fixed. Resources need to be applied. The idea needs to be forced to completion or abandoned.
But the creative brain — the one I am still developing after years of magic practice — sees an unfinished idea differently. An unfinished idea is not a problem. It is a process. It is working on itself below the surface, connecting to other ideas, accumulating nuance, waiting for the missing piece that will complete it.
Learning to tolerate this ambiguity has been one of the most difficult and most valuable adjustments of my entire journey into magic. It required me to accept that some of my best work would come from ideas I could not complete on demand. That patience was not passivity but active trust in a process I could not fully control.
Austin Kleon’s Garden Metaphor
Austin Kleon writes about creativity having seasons — periods of growth and periods of dormancy. Part of the work is knowing which season you are in and acting accordingly. Some ideas are spring ideas, ready to bloom immediately. Others are winter ideas, dormant, waiting for conditions that do not yet exist.
I find this metaphor enormously comforting. It gives me permission to have ideas that are not ready. Permission to note them, tend them gently, and walk away without guilt. The idea will still be there when I come back. And when I come back, I will be different — older, more experienced, with more performances and more life behind me. The person who returns to the idea is better equipped to develop it than the person who first had it.
This is not procrastination. Procrastination is avoiding work you know you should be doing. This is patience with the creative process itself — trusting that some ideas need time, and that the time is not wasted.
What I Have Learned from Long Development
I currently have three pieces in various stages of long-term development. None of them are ready. None of them have performance dates attached to them. I work on them occasionally — a rehearsal here, a script fragment there, a conversation with Adam about a structural problem I cannot solve. Then I put them back in the notebook and return to the material I am actively performing.
From this experience, I have learned several things.
First, the ideas that resist quick completion are usually the most ambitious ones. The pieces that come together easily tend to be variations on things I have already done. The pieces that resist are the ones that are trying to do something new — something I do not yet have the skill or insight to fully realize. They are above my current level, and they need me to grow before they can be finished.
Second, returning to an unfinished idea after months away almost always reveals something I could not see before. The distance provides perspective. Problems that seemed unsolvable when I was immersed in the piece become obvious when I return with fresh eyes. Solutions appear that my focused mind could not find.
Third, the act of living with an idea for a long time changes its character. The piece absorbs experiences from my life. A corporate event where something unexpected happened. A conversation with a spectator that revealed a new way to think about the effect. A personal milestone that gave the piece emotional weight it did not have before. The routine becomes layered with real life in a way that no amount of concentrated short-term writing can achieve.
The Permission to Be Slow
There is a cultural pressure in the magic community, as in most creative communities, to produce. New material. New effects. New videos. New content. The performers who are visible are the ones who are constantly releasing new work. The performers who are quiet are assumed to be inactive.
But some of the greatest creators in magic history were famously slow. They developed material over years. They performed the same pieces for decades, refining them continually, discovering new layers, deepening the work. Their output, measured in quantity, was modest. Measured in quality, it was extraordinary.
I am not comparing myself to those performers. I am years away from their level of craft, and I may never reach it. But the principle applies at every level of development: the best work takes time, and the pressure to produce quickly is the enemy of the best work.
Adam and I talk about this when we work on Vulpine Creations projects together. Some products come together quickly because the concept is clear and the execution is straightforward. Others resist. They need more prototyping, more testing, more time for the design to mature. The ones that take longer are almost always the ones we are proudest of.
The Two-Week Piece
Not everything needs decades. I want to be clear about that because the opposite extreme — using “it needs more time” as an excuse to never finish anything — is equally destructive.
Some pieces genuinely come together in two weeks. The concept is clear. The handling is natural. The script writes itself. The rehearsal confirms what you already knew. These pieces should be performed as soon as they are ready, not held back artificially because you think good work must take a long time.
The skill is in distinguishing between the two-week piece and the twenty-six-year piece. Between the idea that is ready now and the idea that needs another season. Between the creative urgency that says “this is done, perform it” and the premature urgency that says “this needs to be done by Tuesday because I have a gig.”
I have gotten better at this distinction over time, mostly by getting it wrong. I have performed pieces too early, before they were ready, and felt the flatness of material that needed more time. I have also held pieces back too long, overthinking them, waiting for a perfection that does not exist. The sweet spot is somewhere in between, and finding it requires honesty about whether the piece is genuinely unfinished or whether I am simply afraid to perform it.
What Twenty-Six Years Really Means
The twenty-six-year timeline is not about slowness. It is about respect for the creative process.
It says: some ideas are bigger than my current ability to realize them. Some ideas need experiences I have not yet had. Some ideas need skills I have not yet developed. Some ideas need connections to other ideas that do not yet exist in my mind.
And rather than forcing those ideas into a shape that fits my current limitations, I can trust that time will provide what brute effort cannot.
This is perhaps the most counterintuitive lesson I have learned since picking up a deck of cards in a hotel room years ago. In a world that rewards speed and output, the most valuable creative act is sometimes doing nothing. Noting the idea. Tending the notebook. Trusting the process.
The idea will tell you when it is ready. Your job is to listen.
Two weeks or twenty-six years. The timeline is not yours to decide. It belongs to the work. And the work, if you let it, will be worth the wait.