“Does it ever go wrong?”
Probably the question I get asked the most. The answer is, of course, a big fat yes. (Comment if you want a post on some career lows…)
Magic is an unusual profession because you’re attempting to create the illusion of impossibility, while knowing that failure is always possible.
For a long time, I thought being good at what I do meant eliminating failure. As magicians, we can feel that we should be infallible and unshakeable.
The reality is that you can prepare obsessively, rehearse endlessly and build in as many contingencies as possible. But eventually, something will go wrong.
And when it does, the real challenge isn’t generally the failure itself. It’s what we decide that failure says about us. Something goes wrong and instead of thinking, “That didn’t work”, we (me) very quickly start thinking, “I’m not very good at this.”
We treat failure as a verdict rather than information.
As magicians, we don’t really have that luxury. If a trick fails, you have to work out why, change something, practise it and eventually walk back onstage knowing there’s still a chance it could happen again. I think there’s something valuable in that process. Failure becomes something to investigate rather than something to be ashamed of.
Of course, that doesn’t make it enjoyable. Nobody wants to fail, particularly when they’ve invested enormous amounts of time and effort into trying to succeed.
But the only way to progress is to accept that failure comes with trying to get better. We don’t have to enjoy it. We don’t even have to become comfortable with it. But we do have to stop treating failure as evidence that we’re failing.
Perhaps getting better at something isn’t about eliminating failure altogether.
Perhaps it’s about learning to separate what went wrong from what that says about who we are.
