The magic market's biggest profit, is insecurity.

One of the magic market's biggest sales points is showing people reactions that other magicians are getting with their tricks. Most trailers are more about the audience response that a magician gets to their trick, than the trick itself. This is kind of interesting, isn’t it? The thing they are trying to sell to you is the effect, and their biggest sales point is the audience response?

Look if the group is right anyone can get an amazing response with a simple double lift or top change. I’ve made groups run through the street by just showing them a card that changed in their hands. Don’t get me wrong, a properly timed color change is a miracle, however, this also illustrates why audience response is such a weak factor for indicating whether a trick is good or not.

To put it differently. Let’s say that we are a group of people who have never heard music in our lives before. If someone would come along and show us music for the first time, we’d probably lose our minds, wouldn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s not terrible. This is exactly the same with magic. Audiences have rarely seen a magician in real life, there is no standard as to what is good and what’s not. The moment that they’re going to see a magic trick and the atmosphere is right, they are bound to lose their minds.

Furthermore, I may be able to do a routine and get a great audience response whereas one of my friends can do the same routine and get a terrible response. The height of the response depends a lot on the magician as well. How well the routine fits his hands, personality, and how comfortable the person is with it.

Now I can hear some of you thinking that in the end, we do it for the audience, we show them routines in order to get a response. We could even go further and say that we divide our good from our bad material based on the audience's response. While this might be true, I’d say that there is more to magic than just a group of people running around screaming and losing their minds. Even though that’s a super fun reaction to get, if you are performing a one-hour show, and that would be the only response that you’d get it would be a bit shallow, wouldn’t it? Even more, people would get bored after about 15 minutes.

 So if so many more responses are possible, and the audience response is a bad indicator to differentiate the strength of one effect from another. Then why is this the magic market's main selling point? 

Selling point

The magic market sells fantasies, wishful thinking, and emotions. They don’t sell you the actual routine. They sell you the fantasy that if you buy this effect, you’d be able to get responses like this. Wouldn’t you like to get responses like this?

Well, of course, anyone would. But have you considered that people respond better when there is a camera on them? Have you considered that before the main effect is performed a bunch of other effects are performed off-camera to hype the audience up?

In other words, even the response that you see is not an accurate representation of getting such a response from that effect. Yes, the effect is able to get such a response, but much more goes on behind the scenes that is responsible for that response, not just the trick.

Insecurity

The selling point then has to do with two factors. One of them is the group of people who just want to know how it works. We’ve all been part of this group, but this for most people is also a phase that remains for a relatively short time.

The much bigger group, however, is the group of people who want to get the response that the magician in the video is getting.

We want the response that the magician in the video is getting because we have a certain lack of confidence in our magic. We feel like we’re not good enough, we can be better, or we should be better. The only problem is that we don’t know how. So we see this magician in the video getting great responses and we think to ourselves “If only I could get such responses”, and then we go out and buy the trick. Most of this is based on insecurity. We want a certain result and we think we can buy the solution to our problem with the next trick.

It can be any variation of “I’m not good enough”.

What we tend to see is that people are feeling insecure about their magic, which is usually a bigger reflection of how they view themselves as a person, and their relationship to life in general. But it’s kind of funny, because it wasn’t always like this, was it?

I remember feeling on top of the world when I just started with magic, getting these huge responses, feeling like I could concur the world and I was the best magician in it, but with time that feeling got less and less. I even feel less good sometimes than I was in my early days. But why? I have much more knowledge now, I know many more moves and solutions, and if I look back at videos, I’m objectively a few million times better than the terrible double lifts, controls, and pendulum-swinging false deals I used to do. So why do I feel like I’m worse now?

Dunning-Kruger Effect

One thing response for this is the Dunning-Kruger effect. This effect basically states that when you know a little about a big subject you don’t realize how big the wealth of knowledge yet is. Not just that, you also can see the contrast between not being able to do something and being able to do something. So you don’t know any magic tricks, then when you know two or three tricks and moves you feel like you’re the king of the world. You can do something that others don’t know how to do, let alone even comprehend. 

But after a while of learning all these new tricks you finally start to realize how much there is that you don’t know. You realize the wealth of information that you were not aware of before and how much you still have to learn.

Usually, it's stated as something that when you only know 8% of a subject, to your experience the subject’s wealth is only 10%, but that the moment when you reach 12% you all of a sudden realize that the subject has a wealth of 100%. So, you realize how much you don’t know, and your confidence drops. 

This is why some excellent practitioners seem to have low confidence and some beginners seem to have a stupidly high amount of confidence. Sadly, enough some people stay ignorant and will always stay at “Mount Stupid” because they simply stopped learning.

Now the hope is that when we buy that trick that gets that huge reaction, that we will finally regain some confidence, because we can show people amazing stuff again. But the secret is that we can already show people that stuff. 

The way to deal with this is not to buy the next trick, it is the complete opposite. It is to sit down and think about your magic, make notes, and truly study. Don’t just mindlessly consume magic, find things that interest you can study them, figure out what makes them good, and what pulls you towards those things other than “it fooled me”.

The thing is that you’re going to spend some time in the Valley of Despair, but eventually, after enough study and work, you will start to get out of it. The good thing is that your confidence comes back, but this time it’s coupled with a wisdom that wasn’t there before. You can start to see why you like or don’t like certain things. Why some touches are good and others are not. You start to build an opinion about the art and so you can start to develop your own material. Now you’re truly on your way to mastery.

To reach mastery there is no quick fix, not the subconscious message that the magic market tries to sell you, not the “buy this and you will be better”, you’re going to have to work on it.

Again, don’t mistake these words for “it’s bad to buy magic”, but, as a rule of thumb, it’s always better to buy a book, especially old magic books.

As a list of good books to study to elevate your magic:

 All of those books will challenge you in different aspects, but most importantly they have some great fucking magic. Developing a taste for magic is a big one, it will help you to see through effects and you will start to question a lot of hypes that are going around the magic world.

Our goal should be to study and improve, not to consume. Studying and improving will prove to be meaningful, as to where consumption will leave you wanting more but it will never fill that hole you’re trying to fill.

 This was it for the insecurity part, next time I’ll see you again we will talk about one of my favorite subjects, mastery. 

-Rico

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