Overcoming Hurdles

The difficulties we have come across in magic and how we overcome them 

As with many areas in life, magic doesn’t come without difficulties and challenges along the way. It’s our philosophy however, that it’s not about the mistakes you might make or the problems you face, but rather how you overcome these, which makes you into the person, and in this case magician, you are and will propel you to succeed. Over our years of learning and performing magic we have faced our fair share of challenges that we would like to share with you to show that it is ok that something doesn’t run as smoothly as planned or hoped, and share our tips to deal with this. 

Grasping a trick can be hard. You watch the instruction video or read the manual what seems like one hundred times, and in theory it all makes sense. But you pick up your cards, start the trick as per the instructions and the next thing you know, all 52 are on the floor. If you don’t want to spend half your time picking cards up off the floor, magic is probably not the right path for you!  Initially it can feel like you will never get it, but we know from our own experience, practice, practice, practice and you will grasp it. Some tricks take months of practice to master – every spare minute we would be grabbing a deck and practising the moves: breaks at work, on the train, and then the hard work pays off when the trick goes down a storm with our audiences! Although there are tricks that we have been practising for months and still can’t master, we know that over time and with dedication we will one day be performing these with confidence to our audiences, so watch this space... 

It’s not the cheapest activity to have got interested in, and the houses are now piled with various packs cards, gimmicks and books we have accumulated along the years. While learning Double Exposure we ruined multiple packs of cards while practising the pressure fan, but now this is one of our most popular tricks! For many tricks where the audience are asked to write on cards for example, we must then replace cards from spare decks to keep 52 cards topped up in our performance decks, so half the packs of cards we own are missing half the deck!  

Tricks do go wrong. It’s a fact - we are not robots, are there are different factors which effect performances which can leave a trick not going to plan. An audience member might be stood at a particular angle which allows them to see the movement and give the trick away. You might not grip a card correctly meaning you drop the cards or turn over an incorrect card. Someone may have seen the trick before and give away to others how it is done. But we find humour a good counter-defence to problems in performances: be able to laugh at yourself, make a joke and this light hearted approach will ease the situation, whereas getting flustered and panicky will only cause you to over think and become more nervous, resulting in more errors. Have confidence in yourself and the tricks, and remember, your role as a magician is above all to make people happy, entertain them and give them magical memories to take away. Even if doesn’t go wholly to plan you can still achieve these goals and by being human, showing your personality and vulnerability, and you can still create happiness and lasting memories for your audience. 

We hope this helps to ease any challenges and problems you may be having in your own magic or nerves. Perhaps you may have faced other challenges or have different fears for performances:  if so, we would love to hear from you in the comments or contact us directly and we can see if we have any tips or advice we can share with you.