My 12-month Journey

[ii3randonmagic]

After getting Mr. Ortiz's: Lessons in Card Mastery and reading the introduction by Darwin I realized that the claims he made in the 3rd and 4th paragraphs which I will type out below are so true and thinking about it I find myself guilty of exactly what he says not to do he states:

I always thought that the poing of buying a book was the pleasure of reading it. Many magicians, however can't be bothered they go through a magic book the same way a shopper goes through the bargain bin at T.J. Maxx. Pull out a blouse. A quick glance shows that it's the wrong color and toss it aside. Pull out another blouse another quick glance shows that it's the wrong size, so toss it aside. Pull out yet another blouse. Another quick glance shows that it is yet too expensive, so toss it aside and continue rummaging.

I don't think that reading a magic book should be an Easter Egg Hunt. It should be furthering your education in magic. In my view, magic is a craft. It should be studied like a craft. Magic books are among the finest tools for learning your craft. This means that magic books SHOULD BE STUDIED.

I read these two short paragraphs and thought to myself about just how true this was, so I thought of the 12-month journey, what I am imposing during this journey is that a magician takes a book no matter what it is. It can be, Expert at the Card Table, Royal Road, A Tarbell course of in this case a more difficult book. Although most books have more than 12 effects dedicate a month of your life even 20-30 minutes a day to perfect a single routine. Almost to the point where you can perform it with your eyes closed, in a sort of sense. Let me know what you guys think, since tomorrow is my birthday I thought tomorrow would be the perfect day to start and "get to crackin on this first effect "Hold-Card Play". Let me know what you guys think! This is not limited to card magic, learn any sort of magic you would like, mentalism, coin magic, hypnosis, or any other sort of magic!

Thanks,
Brandon

 

[Justin.Morris]

Indeed. It took me six months to read Meads Tangled Web. Same with Maximum Entertainment. But so much more effective. In fact often we blitz through a book or lecture or conference, but we need to consider what are we going to do with all the information after. My work is really big on that too. They will send me to a conference, but they want to know what and how I'm going to implement what I learned. So this is a strong life skill to learn.

Good post.

 

[RealityOne]

Interesting post. I think your idea is a good one.

However, there is an alternative point to be made. It was said eloquently by John Bannon in his forward to John Gustaferro's One Degree:

"As I have learned more, and developed and refined my own thoughts, fewer new things meet my standards; fewer new things seem good. I can, and often do, cruise through a magic book, mainly because it doesn't take much to convince me to move onto the next trick. "

It often depends on the magician and the book. It took me six hours to read Tangled Web. Mainly because Eric's style and mine are very different. It took two weeks reading a half hour a night to read Steinmeyer's Conjuring - each chapter was its own story. For theory books, I can only read a chapter at a time and those take weeks and sometimes months. Same with Tom Stone's books - they make you think so you go slower.

 

[ii3randonmagic]

I think the idea behind this was to make every move as simple as possible and sort of develop my own patter, this is designed for someone to be able to fully understand an effect. I believe I developed this for effects that are more "difficult" to achieve. I've been doing magic for a few years but there is some in this book that I quite frankly don't understand. I highly respect what John Bannon says in the forward he wrote, but for me I find this book a gold mine, even if I don't use everything in this book which I absolutely won't, there's just no way but I want to go effect by effect and be able to master them equally with a simple patter, unless I find the patter for an effect almost impossible to come up with. I'm not sure if your familiar with Darwins writings but he usually has different effects under specific categories such as; Effects that fall under Gambling Mastery, Superhuman Mastery, and Supernatural Mastery. With each section it's like they are each their own book.