Practice: You're Doing It Wrong

Sep 1, 2007
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'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.
 
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Sep 1, 2007
3,786
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Vary Your Routine

In my 25 years on this mortal coil, I've had an unusual gift and curse. My various mental illnesses balanced themselves out by giving me the ability to have laserlike focus on a task that interests me, but the trade off has always been that it's hard to maintain that focus over a long period of time. To compensate, I had to learn to appreciate the boredom that comes with training and practicing, as I described earlier. It allowed me to overcome the problem of drifting off as soon as I plateaued at a skill. This was especially important due to my depression. When the symptoms set in, I have to throw myself into learning a skill. I need to keep my mind engaged. And plateaus are dangerous to that as it diminishes the drive. I learned that the best way to fight this off was to switch up my routine.

The mind and body can only take so much repetition before a rut sets in. Keep in mind that there is a difference between a habit and a rut. Constructive habits are good things to have, but too much inflexible structure in your day-to-day life will cause you to go on auto-pilot and sleepwalk through the day without getting any enjoyment or excitement out of those waking hours. The interesting thing is how one can trick the mind and body out of these states.

The best diets don't involve starvation or strict, no-exceptions calorie counting. Rather, they incorporate healthy eating with one day in the week where you can eat whatever junk you want. This prevents a metabolic reuptake that results in the body hanging onto every single calorie you give it. In other words, by indulging yourself every Saturday and eating like an athlete on Sunday through Friday, you actually trick your body into maintaining a healthy weight. Weird, huh?

The mind works on similar principles. If it detects that there is going to be no change in the routine, it will shut itself down and go into autopilot in order to conserve energy. To put it another way, your brain has a built-in sleep mode. The conscious mind will black out and unconscious conditioning will take over from there. Typically, these shut-downs are pre-scheduled, though they can occur at any point you're doing something you've done a million times before. This is where brain farts come from. In most cases, realizing this happened is enough to snap the conscious mind back into action as if nothing had happened.

To continue practicing and training without worrying about these little hiccups in consciousness, you need to take your routine and add variation to it. While this by no means prevents unconscious auto-pilot from happening at all, it does prevent you from getting stuck in a rut and ending up plateauing on a skill. Start out small, changing your practice routine to something new and different once a week before going back to business as usual. As time goes by, switch it up from day to day. Some days you do nothing but work on your double lift variations. The next day you do dry runs of your new parlor show. The day after that you experiment with different coin vanishes. The way you keep it coherent is remembering your end goal. You do remember that don't you?

Creating this variation in your practice routine keeps the brain excited and engaged. You have no time to lapse into cruise control because you're always paying attention. Periods of rest between long periods of tedium help to refresh you. And when you approach a task fresh, you get more out of it.


Momentum

In September of 2005, a scruffy-looking computer nerd with a guitar and some editing software quit his dayjob as a programmer and started a blog called Thing a Week. Every week for a whole year he wrote, recorded, and released a new song. Jonathan Coulton is now considered the Godfather of Geek Rock and said in an interview from 2008 that in 2007 he made more money from digital downloads and merchandise sales than he did in his last year working as a programmer.

Another tricky thing about the brain is that it is inclined toward intertia like any physical object. If you keep it active, it will try to create more activity. It establishes expectations and if you train yourself to expect a high output of training, then you will start trying to make that a reality. It's how habits get formed, both good and bad.

Now some of you are probably a bit confused, thinking that this section is in contradiction with the previous one. Not at all. In establishing momentum, you're creating activity for yourself to occupy your mind and stay active. It's only when it becomes predictable that it's an issue. That's when it becomes a rut. The energy itself isn't a bad thing.

So how do you get this energy going? With magic there's really only one way to do it: perform. Magic is a performance art, and as such it needs an audience. You need to find a way to be doing something every day, even if it isn't a paid gig. You need to be testing and applying all that you've learned in those boring practice sessions that you've become so critical in. You can't give your brain time to stagnate.

For some people, this is much like Jonathan's "forced march" approach to creativity. Similarly, rapper 50 Cent once was sent to a corporate retreat with a host of other rappers on his label at the time so that they could have a conducive environment to writing new material. Most of them walked out with about 5 songs while 50, who had already gotten into a groove of producing material after his early mix tape campaigns left with 36 new tracks.

The combination of momentum with variations in routine creates that kind of groove. Your output increases dramatically and you learn your skill faster. This is what is actually happening when people attribute other people's success to luck or some sort of prodigious talent. Even Tony Robbins himself admits that he's not a particularly talented speaker, he's just skilled because in the 80's he took every single speaking engagement he could get to the point where he spoke more in a week than some professionals did in a year. It allowed him to fast-track his education in public speaking and presentational skills. He got into the groove.


Conclusion

If you want to stop just tooling around with cards in your bedroom and start seeing results from your practice sessions, you need to re-evaluate how you're doing this. Set a dream and work toward it. Learn to appreciate the boredom and tedium, turning a more critical eye to yourself in the process. Create variations in your routine to prevent yourself from succumbing to tedium and prevent plateaus that hold back your next flash of insight or breakthrough. And build momentum to get yourself into the groove of constant improvement and advancement yoward your dream.

Below are some resources to help you out. Take these seriously because they will help you if you bother to use them.

FreeMind - Mind mapping software in Java. This is my personal favorite of the several I've tried. I prefer these over flowcharts as they're much more flexible and easy to tinker with.
Blog of Tim Ferriss - Again, Tim has some pretty radical and controversial ideas and many people consider him to be an utter charlatan. Still, he brings a lot of interesting ideas on goal setting and skill building to the table. Worth checking out.
The First Season - This book details how Vince Lombardi took the Green Bay Packers from zeroes to heroes in one season. The man was a genius at motivation and getting the most out of training.
Rebel Without a Crew - Though he seems to be making a few missteps lately, Robert Rodriguez was a pretty hot property in Hollywood for a while. In this book he describes how he got his start in filmmaking leading up to his breakthrough with El Mariachi. This emphasizes the need for dreams and momentum.
 
Dec 5, 2009
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Michael Weber told me that Dai Vernon used to say, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect."
 
Apr 5, 2009
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Illinois
i edited my entry post out, because i was dead wrong. i'm gonna print this and read it over and over/taking notes when i've done that i'll post some kind of answer.
 
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I needed this.
Really, im going to shoot myself because im a farting idiot.
For every show i did a new act, using maybe, MAYBE 1 effect from the last. Always doing new materials, always looking, always scavenging when in turn i should have learned 6 effects(thats a usual 30 min set) and really studied them.

This is by far the most ****ed up realization in my whole time in magic and mentalism. Wow, im going to sleep on this and tomorrow get working on that act ive been wanting to do for a while and keep that at hands reach everytime i perform.

Mikk.

PS. I think i wet my pants when i saw that this wasnt an old post but a post made 4 hours ago. Need to find new pants...
 
Jul 1, 2009
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Austin,TX
This essay its so indepth that nobody can possibly can expand on this. This really speak the truth about praticing. Well job Steerpike
 
Very well put, I've wanted to make a post about this for so long but couldn't put in words what you have.

My only addition would be this, Bruce Lee. Simply put he worked on everything he planned to perfect with precision unlike any other. He knew however that the way to accomplish all of this was to work on something so simple, his core.

It governs nearly every motion he did, so he trained it like no other and was quite possibly one of the strongest men ever for somebody in his frame. Ever heard of the aftereffects of his one inch punch?

People have had serious problems with the day after they were hit with this, some even saying unbearable pain and trips to the hospital. His skill with his nunchucks were able to do so much but with one simple object, play ping pong against two highly skilled players, light matches with a striker on the end of the chucks. Overall he was a person like no other, he was a master and the teacher of many things if you look at how he lived his life.

Take what you will from that and incorporate that into your magic.
 
Dec 24, 2009
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Great post, but one question if you ever read this. Do you incorporate this into your daily life now, and if so when did you actually implement it into your life?
 
Apr 5, 2009
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Illinois
ok so my question is, does the boring repetitive playing with cards during class style of practice, have any negative effects? I agree its not as effective as the other methods you mentioned, but if thats all the time you have to spend is ten minutes of that, better than nothing?
 
ok so my question is, does the boring repetitive playing with cards during class style of practice, have any negative effects? I agree its not as effective as the other methods you mentioned, but if thats all the time you have to spend is ten minutes of that, better than nothing?

If you don't have time for magic why do it?
I made time for my magic and am happy for it, you just need to set your schedule and firgure out the gaps. There are more important things to do in class than play around with cards, its not only pure talent and practice that make a magician great, you have to be smart as well, and when performing and you can say that you have studied in college and studied the things you are talking about you get more gratitude .

Mikk.
 
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