At some point in year two, I hit a wall with a particular sequence in a card routine I’d been developing. The sequence required precise coordination between two separate actions — the kind of timing that has to feel completely natural, not calculated, or the whole thing collapses under audience scrutiny.
I’d been working on it for weeks. Not casually — seriously. Daily. With focus. Watching the video, identifying the specific moment where things still weren’t quite right, going back to it. And I wasn’t improving.
My instinct was to practice more. Longer sessions. More repetitions. Double down.
This instinct is almost universally wrong. And Ericsson’s research tells you exactly why.
The Definition of Insanity, Restated
There’s a cliche about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. But the relevant insight isn’t quite that simple. The problem isn’t that you’re being irrational. The problem is that when a skill plateaus, the usual human response — trying harder — doesn’t actually change anything about the approach.
Trying harder means more repetitions of the same pattern. More intensity applied to the same technique. More time invested in the same method.
But if the method isn’t working, more of it won’t help. The plateau is telling you the method has reached its ceiling, not that you haven’t applied it with sufficient force.
Ericsson spent years documenting this in research settings. When subjects hit a plateau, those who broke through it almost universally did so by changing something — their approach, their angle, their focus, the aspect of the skill they were targeting. Not by working harder at the same thing.
This sounds obvious. In practice, it’s very hard to do.
Why We Default to More
There are several reasons the “try harder” instinct is so powerful.
First, effort feels virtuous. Adding more hours, more repetitions, more intensity feels like doing something. It feels like progress even when it isn’t. Changing approach feels like admitting defeat.
Second, we conflate familiarity with improvement. After a hundred more repetitions, the movement feels more familiar, more settled, more comfortable. We interpret that as getting better, when we’ve often just gotten more comfortable with the ceiling.
Third, genuinely changing your approach requires you to become temporarily worse. You have to disrupt the existing pattern — which means introducing friction into something that was at least running smoothly — before you can rebuild it differently. That disruption period is deeply uncomfortable. The temptation to return to comfortable mediocrity is strong.
I knew all of this intellectually. It still took me several extra weeks of banging against the plateau before I actually did something different.
What “Differently” Actually Means
The breakthrough came from changing my practice conditions rather than the practice itself.
What I had been doing: working on the sequence at performance speed, trying to make it feel natural in context.
What I switched to: removing the context entirely. Taking just that specific moment — stripped of everything before and after it — and working on it at a speed slow enough to consciously analyze every component. Not slow like careful. Slow like five times below performance speed.
At that speed, with full attention on the mechanics, I noticed something I’d completely missed. The timing problem I’d been trying to fix was a symptom, not a cause. There was something earlier in the sequence that was setting up the timing problem — a micro-adjustment my hands were making that I wasn’t conscious of. That micro-adjustment had become automatic. I couldn’t see it at performance speed. I couldn’t feel it from inside the movement.
Slowed down far enough, I could see it. And once I could see it, I could work on it.
Within a week of working on the actual cause rather than the symptom I’d been chasing, the sequence started coming together.
The Isolation Principle
What this experience confirmed for me was a principle I now apply systematically: when you’re stuck, isolate.
Don’t practice the routine. Don’t practice the section. Practice the specific moment that isn’t working — and practice it in isolation, separated from everything that surrounds it in performance.
This is counterintuitive because performance is about flow, and isolation breaks flow. But flow is the enemy of diagnosis. When you’re inside the flow of a routine, your attention is on the whole, on what’s coming next, on the shape of the performance. You don’t have the bandwidth to carefully examine any one moment.
Isolation gives you that bandwidth. It lets you turn the magnification up.
Often, what you find when you magnify is that the problem you thought you were having isn’t the actual problem. You’re addressing the symptom while the cause sits upstream, hiding in the automated part of the sequence that you’ve stopped looking at because you think you’ve got it handled.
Changing the Constraint
Another approach I’ve found useful: change what you’re optimizing for, temporarily.
If I’m stuck on timing, I stop trying to fix timing and instead optimize for something else entirely — maybe economy of movement, maybe the visual line from the audience’s angle, maybe complete relaxation of my grip. Change the parameter you’re working on.
This sometimes unlocks timing automatically, because what I thought was a timing problem was actually a tension problem, or a position problem, or something else that was upstream of timing. By shifting my focus, I accidentally discovered the real issue.
It also gives my brain a different angle of approach. Problems that are intractable from one perspective often yield from another. The plateau is partly a neurological phenomenon — you’ve built one pattern for addressing this challenge, and it’s not working, but it’s the only tool you’re reaching for. Deliberately working on something adjacent can break the pattern and let you see the original problem with fresh eyes.
The Difficult Discipline
The hardest part of this is not the technique. It’s the patience.
When you’re stuck and you change approach, things usually get worse before they get better. Isolation feels awkward. Slow practice feels tedious. Working on a different parameter feels like ignoring the problem.
The temptation, especially late in an evening in a hotel room when you’re tired and you just want to feel like you accomplished something, is to return to the comfortable repetition. Run through the routine. Feel the smoothness of what you’ve automated. End the session feeling okay rather than frustrated.
That’s the choice that keeps you at the plateau.
I’ve had to build a small discipline around this: before I end a session, I have to have done something uncomfortable. Not hours of it — just something. One pass at a genuinely difficult angle. One attempt at a different approach. One moment of working on the thing I’ve been avoiding because it makes me worse before it makes me better.
That commitment to doing something differently, even when it’s uncomfortable, is what separates the sessions that move the needle from the ones that just log hours.
What Progress Actually Feels Like
Real breakthrough after a plateau rarely feels like a breakthrough. It’s usually subtle. Things feel slightly less stuck. A specific moment starts coming out right slightly more often. Something that required intense concentration starts requiring a bit less.
The dramatic moment of everything suddenly clicking is real, but it usually follows weeks of incremental movement that didn’t feel like movement at all. You can’t feel the progress during the difficult part. You only see it on the other side.
This is probably the most important thing to understand about plateaus: you can’t reliably detect whether your new approach is working while you’re in it. You have to trust the process long enough to get data.
The combination of patience and genuine change of approach is what breaks the plateau. Not heroic effort applied to the same dead-end method.
Try differently. Not harder. That’s the whole thing.
And when you break the plateau and keep building — what’s actually happening inside your brain? The neuroscience is more interesting than I expected.