'Tis the season for miracles. So I figured I'd stop being a bastard long enough to put this up before I retreat back to my own egocentric microcosm.
"To me, 'practicing' is something you do when you're fiddling around, not taking it seriously. I 'train,' which means I take it as seriously as someone who trains for the Olympics."
-De'vo vom Schattenreich
Much is made of the importance of practice in magic. No one disputes that you have to do this to improve. But just because you are practicing doesn't mean you're getting the most out of it. There's a lot you could be doing that would increase your gains and progress.
A lot of people aren't aware of this because we live in a time where the apprenticeship is all but dead. Our society for the past century, if not longer, has glorified instant gratification. Many magicians complain about the misleading message of, "Learn Magic Today!!" ads while simultaneously forgetting that those same ads were around in comic books back when those still cost a quarter. And those same magicians may be practicing, but they're not getting very good returns on their investment of time and effort. Some of them don't even perform.
So how do you practice the right way? It's a combination of factors I'll be going over in this write-up. This information is collected from personal experience, the words of mentors, and science. Thus begins the lesson.
Setting Goals and Dreams
Author and entrepreneur Timothy Ferris is a rather controversial figure due to some of his claims and ideas that seem to stretch credibility. He does however present a lot of valid points. One thing that he emphasizes is the use of fixed period dreamlines, or things you want to have, do, and accomplish within a stretch of 6 to 12 months. He says to figure them out and then move on to figuring what kind of money and time you'll have to invest into it, and work backward from there.
The idea of reverse engineering one's goals is not a new idea. Tim sets himself apart however by talking in terms of dreams instead of goals. He encourages people to meld pragmatism with ambition. Too much of either one and you end up sabotaging yourself due to imbalance. Nevertheless, having this path is vitally important for the same reason that you don't want to board a plane with a pilot who doesn't know you're trying to get to the opposite coast.
So before you pick up the cards and coins, think about what you want. What are you trying to accomplish? Don't give me any of those saccharine, feel-good non-answers like I'd get from the now-dead Cerca Trova or from those apes at the Magic Cafe. None of this, "I just want to make people smile," garbage. Where do you want to go with this? If you're not prepared to put serious thought into your answer, then click the "Back" button on your browser now because nothing beyond this point is going to help you.
Now that you have a goal, you need to work backwards. Let's say you want to perform in the Vegas nightclub scene. What would the step immediately before that be? And before that? And before that? Keep stepping back until you've reached the point you're at now. You now have a road map to your dream. Take each of those steps and break it down into manageable tasks. Make it a point to every day do at least three things that will help you reach the next step, more if you've got the time and resources.
You're going to hit setbacks. This is unavoidable. What you do is adjust the plan as you go along to account for these things. Even if the absolute worst case scenario happens and you end up back at square one, you keep adjusting the plan.
At this point you're probably asking what this has to do with practice. Everything. To illustrate, let me share with you a little story. Pavel Tsatsouline is Russian ex-military and a personal trainer to US military and law enforcement. When he and some of his colleagues set up a booth at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Fitness Expo, they issued a challenge to anyone who passed by. The challenge was to do a strict, knees locked military press with an 88-pound kettlebell. Don't know what that is? It's this thing:
http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-70529699571169_2044_495132
Yeah. Unwieldly isn't it? Anyone who's done a military press before should know that such a challenge would be grueling. Here's the thing. Performing strongmen and competitive power lifters were able to meet the challenge. But gigantic bodybuilders couldn't. Why not? Simple.
Power lifters and strongmen train for one goal and one goal only: pure strength. They tailor their workouts and exercise regimens to work toward this goal. Yeah, some of these guys get pretty beefy in the process, but most of them are actually very lithe and wiry. The bodybuilders however engage in long training sessions pushing their muscles to failure in order to build up more muscle mass and muscular endurance. As a result, the power lifters were able to overcome the bad leverage and ungainly weight of trying to do a military with a giant kettlebell, but the bodybuilders were unused to those conditions and couldn't pull it off. The lifters and bodybuilders may have seemed the same, but in reality had very different skillsets.
This is why I'm starting this article encouraging you to figure out where you want to go with magic. Having a goal will help you develop the right skillset.
Learn to Love the Boredom
According to Malcolm Gladwell, mastery of a skillset requires at least 10,000 hours of work. At one hour a day, that's about 27 years. At two hours a day, that 13.5 years. At four hours a day that's just over 6 years. At 8 hours a day, that's 3 years. Pretty mind-boggling isn't it? But don't mistake this for me telling you to spend all 16 waking hours practicing just so you can achieve mastery in the span of only 18 months. That's just ridiculous, and I'll elaborate more on that later.
There's nothing wrong with taking time to learn a skill. You don't have to do it overnight. And mastery isn't the requirement for being good at what you do. The key thing here is that the time you take to learn is going to be boring at times. After a while, you'll get sick of double lifts and shuttle passes and rehearsing your lines. There's no way to get around it: training a skill is boring and tedious.
What you can do is learn to appreciate that boredom. I'm willing to bet that most of you go through the motions, you do your practice, and you're still not as good as you think you should be. It's not enough to just fiddle with cards in the middle of class (when you should be paying attention and studying! You know who you are!), you have to actually be paying attention to yourself during practice.
There are two reasons I have noticed why most magicians practice for ungodly amounts of time but don't make much progress.
The first reason is that they practice a large variety of moves, but never focus on a couple that will give them the most mileage. They're always adding new tricks and sleights to their repertoire without ever focusing on a set of fundamentals. They practice the move, but then fail to do anything interesting with it because they don't approach the performances (if they ever even perform) with the same eye toward training and improvement. This is where webcam jockeys come from. That's not to say that I don't believe in the jack-of-all-trades philosophy, just that I think the reason it doesn't work for so many people is because they never bother to ground themselves before shooting off aimlessly, trying to get good at something they don't even fully grasp.
The second reason is because the equation is incomplete. Everything is a learning experience, but they're not approaching it right. If you want to be a competitive martial artist, you don't sit out of sparring in order to keep practicing your punching technique on a speed bag. You have to participate in some matches, and you're going to take a few losses in the process. So if you want to be a magician, why would you only perform a couple times a year while spending more time practicing than you do with your family?
You need to overcome these hurtles and really appreciate what time you spend practicing. You don't need to play guitar 8 hours a day if you learn how to step out of your own head and get just as much learning out of only 2 hours of practice. Rather than shutting your mind off and going through the motions to build up nothing but muscle memory, take the time to really get into what your doing. Learn to see the nuances, appreciate variations, start thinking laterally. Before long, you'll see much better returns on your practice time.
"To me, 'practicing' is something you do when you're fiddling around, not taking it seriously. I 'train,' which means I take it as seriously as someone who trains for the Olympics."
-De'vo vom Schattenreich
Much is made of the importance of practice in magic. No one disputes that you have to do this to improve. But just because you are practicing doesn't mean you're getting the most out of it. There's a lot you could be doing that would increase your gains and progress.
A lot of people aren't aware of this because we live in a time where the apprenticeship is all but dead. Our society for the past century, if not longer, has glorified instant gratification. Many magicians complain about the misleading message of, "Learn Magic Today!!" ads while simultaneously forgetting that those same ads were around in comic books back when those still cost a quarter. And those same magicians may be practicing, but they're not getting very good returns on their investment of time and effort. Some of them don't even perform.
So how do you practice the right way? It's a combination of factors I'll be going over in this write-up. This information is collected from personal experience, the words of mentors, and science. Thus begins the lesson.
Setting Goals and Dreams
Author and entrepreneur Timothy Ferris is a rather controversial figure due to some of his claims and ideas that seem to stretch credibility. He does however present a lot of valid points. One thing that he emphasizes is the use of fixed period dreamlines, or things you want to have, do, and accomplish within a stretch of 6 to 12 months. He says to figure them out and then move on to figuring what kind of money and time you'll have to invest into it, and work backward from there.
The idea of reverse engineering one's goals is not a new idea. Tim sets himself apart however by talking in terms of dreams instead of goals. He encourages people to meld pragmatism with ambition. Too much of either one and you end up sabotaging yourself due to imbalance. Nevertheless, having this path is vitally important for the same reason that you don't want to board a plane with a pilot who doesn't know you're trying to get to the opposite coast.
So before you pick up the cards and coins, think about what you want. What are you trying to accomplish? Don't give me any of those saccharine, feel-good non-answers like I'd get from the now-dead Cerca Trova or from those apes at the Magic Cafe. None of this, "I just want to make people smile," garbage. Where do you want to go with this? If you're not prepared to put serious thought into your answer, then click the "Back" button on your browser now because nothing beyond this point is going to help you.
Now that you have a goal, you need to work backwards. Let's say you want to perform in the Vegas nightclub scene. What would the step immediately before that be? And before that? And before that? Keep stepping back until you've reached the point you're at now. You now have a road map to your dream. Take each of those steps and break it down into manageable tasks. Make it a point to every day do at least three things that will help you reach the next step, more if you've got the time and resources.
You're going to hit setbacks. This is unavoidable. What you do is adjust the plan as you go along to account for these things. Even if the absolute worst case scenario happens and you end up back at square one, you keep adjusting the plan.
At this point you're probably asking what this has to do with practice. Everything. To illustrate, let me share with you a little story. Pavel Tsatsouline is Russian ex-military and a personal trainer to US military and law enforcement. When he and some of his colleagues set up a booth at the Arnold Schwarzenegger Fitness Expo, they issued a challenge to anyone who passed by. The challenge was to do a strict, knees locked military press with an 88-pound kettlebell. Don't know what that is? It's this thing:
http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/yhst-70529699571169_2044_495132
Yeah. Unwieldly isn't it? Anyone who's done a military press before should know that such a challenge would be grueling. Here's the thing. Performing strongmen and competitive power lifters were able to meet the challenge. But gigantic bodybuilders couldn't. Why not? Simple.
Power lifters and strongmen train for one goal and one goal only: pure strength. They tailor their workouts and exercise regimens to work toward this goal. Yeah, some of these guys get pretty beefy in the process, but most of them are actually very lithe and wiry. The bodybuilders however engage in long training sessions pushing their muscles to failure in order to build up more muscle mass and muscular endurance. As a result, the power lifters were able to overcome the bad leverage and ungainly weight of trying to do a military with a giant kettlebell, but the bodybuilders were unused to those conditions and couldn't pull it off. The lifters and bodybuilders may have seemed the same, but in reality had very different skillsets.
This is why I'm starting this article encouraging you to figure out where you want to go with magic. Having a goal will help you develop the right skillset.
Learn to Love the Boredom
According to Malcolm Gladwell, mastery of a skillset requires at least 10,000 hours of work. At one hour a day, that's about 27 years. At two hours a day, that 13.5 years. At four hours a day that's just over 6 years. At 8 hours a day, that's 3 years. Pretty mind-boggling isn't it? But don't mistake this for me telling you to spend all 16 waking hours practicing just so you can achieve mastery in the span of only 18 months. That's just ridiculous, and I'll elaborate more on that later.
There's nothing wrong with taking time to learn a skill. You don't have to do it overnight. And mastery isn't the requirement for being good at what you do. The key thing here is that the time you take to learn is going to be boring at times. After a while, you'll get sick of double lifts and shuttle passes and rehearsing your lines. There's no way to get around it: training a skill is boring and tedious.
What you can do is learn to appreciate that boredom. I'm willing to bet that most of you go through the motions, you do your practice, and you're still not as good as you think you should be. It's not enough to just fiddle with cards in the middle of class (when you should be paying attention and studying! You know who you are!), you have to actually be paying attention to yourself during practice.
There are two reasons I have noticed why most magicians practice for ungodly amounts of time but don't make much progress.
The first reason is that they practice a large variety of moves, but never focus on a couple that will give them the most mileage. They're always adding new tricks and sleights to their repertoire without ever focusing on a set of fundamentals. They practice the move, but then fail to do anything interesting with it because they don't approach the performances (if they ever even perform) with the same eye toward training and improvement. This is where webcam jockeys come from. That's not to say that I don't believe in the jack-of-all-trades philosophy, just that I think the reason it doesn't work for so many people is because they never bother to ground themselves before shooting off aimlessly, trying to get good at something they don't even fully grasp.
The second reason is because the equation is incomplete. Everything is a learning experience, but they're not approaching it right. If you want to be a competitive martial artist, you don't sit out of sparring in order to keep practicing your punching technique on a speed bag. You have to participate in some matches, and you're going to take a few losses in the process. So if you want to be a magician, why would you only perform a couple times a year while spending more time practicing than you do with your family?
You need to overcome these hurtles and really appreciate what time you spend practicing. You don't need to play guitar 8 hours a day if you learn how to step out of your own head and get just as much learning out of only 2 hours of practice. Rather than shutting your mind off and going through the motions to build up nothing but muscle memory, take the time to really get into what your doing. Learn to see the nuances, appreciate variations, start thinking laterally. Before long, you'll see much better returns on your practice time.
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