I swear I’m going to finish my series on crowd work, but the deadline for this column was looming and I had this unpublished article just sitting on my computer. And, yes, it’s called “The Poop Draft,” which means there are a ton of poop jokes in it (fair warning). So, without further adoo-doo…. (I’m just getting started.)
If there’s one secret to being really good at magic, it’s that you have to first be willing to be really bad at magic.
That’s right: if you want to be The S---, you have to be willing, for a while, to be s---.
Great magic (or any great art for that matter) doesn’t just spring, fully formed, into existence. The best magicians start with a rough, incomplete idea of a thing. There’s only so much you can practice a trick without an audience; eventually, you have to sneak the new, unfinished thing onstage (generally in between things that do work) and pray that, through repetition, the material eventually approaches something like “acceptable,” and then, after more repetitions, “good,” and then, maybe, after thousands more performances, “great.”