In How Magicians Think, Joshua Jay poses a question that sounds simple but cuts deep: why do magicians perform magic? Not the polite answer you give at dinner parties. The real answer. The one that explains why you spend hundreds of hours alone in hotel rooms practicing something that most people will never fully appreciate.
Jay identifies three primary drives, drawn from the performers he has known and studied across decades. Each drive shapes not just why someone performs but how they perform, what they practice, what they value, and what success looks like to them.
The three drives are escape, calling, and pushing the craft.
When I first read Jay’s taxonomy, I thought I could immediately identify which one described me. I was wrong. And the process of figuring out where I actually fit changed how I think about my entire relationship with magic.
The Escape Drive
Some magicians come to magic because they need to get away from something. The world is too much, and magic provides an alternate reality where different rules apply. Where the impossible is possible. Where you have control over something — even if it is just a deck of cards.
Jay describes Warner Reich, who survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding in a storeroom. The magician who visited that storeroom and performed tricks for the hidden children was not just entertaining them. He was offering them a temporary escape from a reality that was unbearable. Magic was not a diversion. It was a lifeline.
The escape drive is more common than most performers admit. Not everyone is escaping something as extreme as Reich’s experience. But many magicians discovered the art during a period of difficulty — loneliness, illness, loss, social isolation. Magic gave them something that their primary reality did not: a sense of agency, of mastery, of being able to create moments of genuine wonder in a world that otherwise felt hostile or empty.
I recognized elements of the escape drive in my own story. I started learning card magic because I could not bring music on the road. Two hundred nights a year in hotels, separated from my instruments, from my social life, from anything that felt like home. I needed something to do with my hands and mind. I needed a portable world.
That is not the same as fleeing a traumatic experience. But it is a form of escape. The hotel room, the deck of cards, the online tutorial — that became a space where I could be someone other than the consultant who was tired and far from home. In that space, I was a student of something ancient and fascinating. The loneliness of the road became, paradoxically, the foundation of a creative practice.
The Calling Drive
Other magicians perform because they feel compelled to. Not compelled by external forces but by an internal gravity that pulls them toward the art regardless of practical considerations.
Jay describes Abi-Lynn Albani, who continued performing close-up magic despite significant physical challenges. Her body paid a real price for her practice and performance schedule. But she could not stop. The drive was not rational. It was not a career calculation. It was something closer to a biological imperative — the sense that performing magic was what she was put on earth to do.
The calling drive is the one most romanticized in the magic community. It produces the stories people love to tell: the kid who saw a magic show at age five and never looked back. The performer who gave up a lucrative career in medicine or law to pursue magic full-time. The artist who sacrifices financial security for the freedom to create.
I do not have this drive. I want to be honest about that. I did not feel called to magic. I stumbled into it. I bought a deck of cards because I was bored in a hotel room, not because something in my soul demanded it. My childhood experience with a clown performer in Austria had given me a negative impression of magic — I thought it was childish, something for kids’ birthday parties. The idea that I would one day co-found a magic company would have struck twenty-five-year-old me as absurd.
And I think that is perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to feel called. Not every meaningful creative pursuit begins with a spiritual awakening. Sometimes it begins with boredom and a credit card and an ellusionist.com account.
The Craft Drive
The third drive Jay describes is the most intellectual of the three. Some magicians perform because they are obsessed with pushing the craft forward. They see magic as an art form with unsolved problems, unexplored territories, and unrealized potential. Their primary motivation is not escape or spiritual compulsion but the desire to make magic better than it was when they found it.
Jay points to David Copperfield as the exemplar of this drive. Here is a man worth close to a billion dollars, performing five hundred shows a year, owning a private island — and he spends hours at three in the morning perfecting the way a curtain falls during a reveal. Not because he needs to. Not because anyone will notice. But because it is not yet right, and the craft demands that it be right.
This drive produces the innovators, the theorists, the people who write the books that everyone else learns from. It also produces an interesting side effect: the craft-driven performer often derives as much satisfaction from the process of creation as from the performance itself. The puzzle of how to make something work better, the engineering of a new approach, the theoretical breakthrough that resolves a design problem — these are the rewards that keep the craft-driven magician going.
Where I Actually Fit
When I first read Jay’s taxonomy, I assumed I was craft-driven. I spend enormous amounts of time studying theory. I read Ortiz and Tamariz and Brown and McCabe not because someone assigned them but because the ideas fascinate me. I approach magic with the same analytical rigor I bring to strategy consulting. I love the intellectual challenge of designing effects that feel impossible.
But that was not the whole truth.
The deeper I thought about it, the more I realized that my drive is a combination of all three — weighted differently at different times, depending on what is happening in my life.
When I first started, the drive was primarily escape. Magic was a refuge from the monotony of consulting travel. A portable creative practice that transformed lonely hotel rooms into workshops.
As I got deeper — as I met Adam, as we started Vulpine Creations, as I began incorporating magic into my keynote speaking — the drive shifted toward calling. Not a mystical calling, but the growing sense that this was meant to be part of my life. That the intersection of consulting, magic, and performance was not an accident but a convergence that I needed to follow.
And now, after years of study and practice and performance, the drive is increasingly about craft. About making my work better. About understanding the principles deeply enough to create something original. About contributing to the tradition rather than just borrowing from it.
Why It Matters Which Drive Is Yours
This is not just philosophical navel-gazing. Knowing which drive is primary for you has practical consequences.
If your primary drive is escape, you need to be careful about burnout. Magic that exists primarily as a refuge can become a burden when it transitions from private practice to public performance. The solitude that drew you to the art can be destroyed by the social demands of performing. I have seen magicians who loved the private world of practice but hated the public world of performance — and they could not understand why because they had not identified their drive accurately.
If your primary drive is calling, you need to be careful about sustainability. The compulsion to perform can lead to neglecting other areas of your life. It can also lead to frustration when the external world does not value your art as much as you feel it deserves. The calling-driven performer often struggles with the business side of magic because commercial considerations feel like a betrayal of something sacred.
If your primary drive is craft, you need to be careful about losing sight of the audience. The intellectual satisfaction of solving a design problem can become an end in itself, disconnected from the experience you are creating for the people watching. I have caught myself designing effects that are brilliant in theory and lifeless in practice — because I was optimizing for elegance rather than for impact.
The Evolution of Drives Over a Career
Jay observes something that I think is profoundly true: most magicians’ drives evolve over their careers. The person who starts with escape may discover calling along the way. The person who starts with calling may develop a passion for craft as they mature. The craft-driven performer may, after years of intellectual pursuit, discover that the real reward is the human connection of live performance.
My own evolution — from escape to something resembling calling to a growing focus on craft — is not unique. It is, I think, a common trajectory for adult learners who come to magic from other fields. We start because we need something. We continue because we discover something. And we persist because we want to contribute something.
The important thing is to be honest with yourself about where you are right now. Not where you think you should be. Not where the romantic narrative says you should be. But where you actually are.
Because the answer to “why do I do this?” determines the answer to “what should I do next?” If you are escape-driven, protect the private practice that brought you joy. If you are calling-driven, find ways to perform that sustain rather than deplete you. If you are craft-driven, make sure your intellectual pursuits stay connected to the living experience of performing for real people.
The Fourth Drive
There is a drive Jay does not explicitly name but that I have observed in myself and in other performers who came to magic as adults: the integration drive. The desire to make magic part of a larger creative and professional life rather than an end in itself.
I do not perform magic because I want to be a magician. I perform magic because magic makes everything else I do more interesting, more effective, and more meaningful. It enhances my keynote speaking. It deepens my understanding of human psychology. It gives me a creative outlet that complements my analytical work. It connects me to a community of people — Adam, the Vulpine Creations world, performers and creators around the globe — who think about the world in ways that challenge and inspire me.
This is not escape, calling, or craft, exactly. It is integration. The drive to weave magic into the fabric of a full life rather than making it the entire fabric.
I suspect this drive is more common among adult learners than the magic community generally acknowledges. Not everyone who practices magic seriously wants to be a full-time performer. Some of us want to be full-time humans who happen to do extraordinary things with a deck of cards and the power of suggestion.
And that, I have come to believe, is a perfectly valid reason to study the deepest principles of the art. You do not need to perform five hundred shows a year to benefit from understanding why some magic produces wonder and some produces puzzlement. You do not need a residency at the Magic Castle to appreciate the difference between conviction and technique. You just need curiosity, discipline, and the willingness to keep going.
Which is, when I think about it, exactly what brought me to a hotel room with a deck of cards all those years ago.