Practice Like A Performer: A Magician’s Perspective on Your 9-to-5
Discover how to transform your everyday job into a journey of growth and development with the unconventional wisdom of a practicing magician.
In this article, I share with you my magician’s secret to approaching practice and why a simple change of language ensures that I never have to “work” a day in my life.
Inspired by a jazz musician's insightful tips on "how to practice," I recently reflected on the nature of my own practice as a magician. And it made me question what practice actually means to me as a magician.
You see, I don’t actually practice. Or at least I don’t call it that.
I inspect, I break down. I script and I block.
I tweak, touch-up, test-out.
Analyze, assess, recognize, repeat.
I rehearse, run through, I take breaks, I laugh, I learn.
I finesse without finalizing.
I don't practice; I play.
Can you practice your job?
When people see me do magic, they most often exclaim: "you must practice for hours every day!" Rather than saying what I just told you, I say: “yes, all the time.”
But after hearing this same question for years I started asking people in return: "What about you, do you practice your job?"
And the person, typically someone with a "9-to-5" corporate job, would laugh every time, looking at me like I’m a fool.
I learned two things from their response:
1. People in the corporate world don't often think of their job responsibilities as something they can practice.
2. Most people actually practice every day, but don't realize they are already doing it.
Who practices their jobs?
A manager practices having engaging employee meetings.
A CEO practices pitching his company to attract more investors.
The head of HR practices makes employees feel satisfied with their job.
The leader on the sales board practices identifying customer needs and matching them to the product benefits.
The basketball player practices free throws.
The salesperson practices cold calls.
The singer practices the chorus.
The salesperson practices the features & benefits.
The chef practices perfecting a recipe.
The salesperson practices perfecting the flow of the sale.
What do you do for a living?
I don’t know what work you do for a living, but I am assuming you have different components to your job. There’s some physical tasks you do, and there are verbal tasks. There are things you do by yourself. And others that require you to interact with other people.
I believe that whether you're a nurse, teacher, banker, restaurant server or software engineer, you can practice what you do, just like an athlete or a magician. In fact, you may already be doing it and not know it.
How I practice as a magician:
As a magician, to amaze my audiences I have to pay attention to the layers of perception and angles of thought they bring to the table. I have to see things from my audience members’ eyes.
It's difficult for me to practice a magic trick when I am not "on stage."
Performing for a live audience is the best time to practice getting better at what I do. Not the rest of the day when I am in quiet solitude at my home or office.
In rehearsal, I can anticipate where the audience will look or what they might say. But I can't practice how I will react when someone says or does something unexpected.
It’s also difficult to replicate the excitement you get from an audience when you’re off of the stage. I can practice the technique in front of a mirror. But I can't perform it with the same energy when there is no one in the room. I can't fake the love I get from an audience.
And most importantly, because my job requires an audience to perceive my magic, the only time I can truly “practice” what I do is when I actually do it for a live audience.
So this is why I say: "I get paid to practice."
Does your job pay you to practice?
So let’s get back to your job and how you practice what you do.
Unless you work at Disney World, you most likely don’t think about the people you interact with as your audience and you don’t consider your customer interactions as performances.
And, unless you are a yoga teacher or lawyer, you probably don't think of your job tasks as something you can explicitly practice.
But if you adopt my viewpoint as a magician, you’ll gain a new perspective on what practice can mean to you. If you look deeper at what you do, you'll see that every day you are already “practicing” your job. You've just called it "working."
If that’s the case for you, you don’t have to change the reality of what you’re doing. You just need to change your own perception of the tasks that make up your day.
Changing your language from “I do” to “I practice” shifts the task from a one-time experience you can either fail or succeed at, to an everlasting process you get to constantly tweak and improve.
Changing the language removes the stress of having to deliver. It reminds you that there are no mistakes, only lessons.
By identifying your work tasks and interactions as something you get to practice, you allow yourself the exciting opportunity to become better while you're getting paid for it.
You can choose to do this every day if you want to. Or you can just “go to work.”
It’s your choice. It’s your language.
That’s my secret. Learn to think (and practice) like a magician. And then you, too, won’t have to work a day for the rest of your life. ##
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