It started around 2012, when I was traveling extensively as a consultant. I couldn’t take my guitar on the road, and I needed something to fill the hotel room evenings. One night I saw a magic trick on YouTube — either Derren Brown or David Blaine — and something clicked. I bought my first deck of cards and some online tutorials from ellusionist.com.
Years later, magic had become one of the defining elements of my professional identity. I’d co-founded a magic product company and discovered that the principles underlying great magic are essentially the same principles underlying great business. The connection between these two worlds — performance art and business building — transformed how I think about both.
But that’s the retrospective narrative. In the moment, sitting in a hotel room with a deck of cards, I had no plan for any of that. I just thought sleight of hand looked interesting, and I wanted to learn something that had nothing to do with my career.
That absence of professional motivation might be the most important part of the story.
The Beginner’s Mind in My Thirties
Learning a physical skill from scratch as an adult is humbling in a way that nothing else replicates. At the time, I was deep into my consulting career. I could command a room, advise CEOs, and design complex strategy programs. I was competent, confident, and comfortable.
Then I tried to do a basic card sleight and dropped the deck. The cards sprayed everywhere. The gap between what I saw on those tutorial videos and what my hands could actually do was enormous.
That humiliation was exactly what I needed. As a mid-career professional, I’d forgotten what it felt like to be genuinely bad at something. The discomfort of incompetence had faded from my daily experience, and with it, my empathy for clients and founders who were learning new things and struggling.
Relearning how to learn — sitting with the frustration of failure, celebrating tiny improvements, trusting that repetition would eventually produce competence — renewed a capacity that had atrophied. And that renewed capacity made me better at everything else, because it reminded me that growth always starts with the willingness to be terrible.
Ship it ugly is a principle I could articulate before magic, but I didn’t fully understand it until I stood in front of family members and performed a trick badly. The “ugly” version of a magic trick — fumbled, obvious, imperfect — is where learning happens. You can’t improve what you haven’t attempted.
The Five Business Lessons Magic Taught Me
Over years of studying, practicing, and eventually designing magic, five specific parallels between magic and business became impossible to ignore.
Lesson 1: The method is not the effect.
In magic, the “method” is how the trick works. The “effect” is what the audience experiences. These are completely different things. A magician who focuses on method creates technically perfect tricks that leave audiences cold. A magician who focuses on effect creates experiences that feel impossible, even if the method is simple.
In business, the method is your process — how you deliver your service or build your product. The effect is the customer’s experience — how they feel, what they remember, what they tell others. Most founders are obsessed with method (their process, their technology, their approach) and underinvest in effect (the customer’s emotional experience).
The experience map framework is directly inspired by this distinction. Mapping every customer touchpoint is about designing the effect, not just optimizing the method.
Lesson 2: Misdirection is about attention management, not deception.
Misdirection in magic isn’t lying. It’s directing attention toward what matters and away from what doesn’t. The audience doesn’t look at the left hand because the right hand is doing something more interesting.
In business, “misdirection” translates to focus management. The best businesses direct customer attention toward their strengths and away from their limitations — not through deception, but through emphasis. Your marketing emphasizes what you do best. Your product design highlights core features. Your communication focuses on outcomes, not process details.
Lesson 3: Presentation multiplies the value of the product.
An average magic trick presented brilliantly is worth more than a brilliant trick presented poorly. The presentation — the story, the pacing, the audience interaction, the emotional arc — multiplies the raw value of the method.
In business, presentation multiplies product value the same way. Packaging, onboarding, communication, brand voice — these “presentation” elements often matter more for customer perception than the technical quality of the product itself. Vulpine’s obsessive attention to packaging and instructional materials wasn’t a luxury. It was a multiplier.
Lesson 4: Practice the boring fundamentals endlessly.
Magic skill is built through thousands of repetitions of basic moves. The double lift. The pass. The palm. These fundamentals aren’t exciting. They’re the foundation of everything exciting. Magicians who skip fundamentals to learn flashy tricks produce inconsistent, unreliable performances.
Business fundamentals work the same way. Invoicing. Follow-up. Delivery consistency. Customer communication. The best founders are boring operators because they’ve mastered the fundamentals that make everything else possible.
Lesson 5: The audience completes the experience.
In magic, the audience’s interpretation creates the miracle. The magician provides stimuli; the audience constructs the impossible narrative. If the audience doesn’t engage — if they’re passive observers instead of active participants — the magic doesn’t work.
In business, the customer completes the experience. A product isn’t valuable until a customer uses it. A service isn’t impactful until a client implements recommendations. Designing for customer participation — making it easy and natural for them to engage, use, and benefit — is as important as designing the product itself.
The Path to Vulpine
Learning magic connected me to the magic community — a passionate, supportive, surprisingly large global network of performers and enthusiasts. Through this community, I met Adam Wilber, who would become my business partner. I’d actually discovered Adam’s work years earlier through Illusionist DVDs — he was one of the performers I studied alongside Peter McKinnon, Chris Ramsey, and others. When I eventually needed a keynote speaker for an accelerator event, I reached out to Adam. The chemistry was immediate, and that connection eventually led to Vulpine Creations.
The magic community also showed me a market gap. Most magic products were either cheap mass-produced items or expensive, limited-edition collector pieces. The middle ground — high-quality, thoughtfully designed, reasonably priced products for serious practitioners — was underserved.
I didn’t set out to start a magic product company. I set out to learn card tricks. But the skills I developed combined with the market insight I gained from the community created an opportunity that I couldn’t have seen from outside.
This accidental path — hobby leads to community, community leads to insight, insight leads to business — is more common than the narrative of “I identified a market opportunity and built a company to address it.” The best businesses often start from genuine passion and expertise rather than from market analysis.
Starting Something at Any Age
The broader lesson from starting magic in my thirties is about the value of learning something new in mid-career. Not for the specific skill — for what the learning process does to your thinking.
When you’re expert in one domain, your thinking patterns become grooved. You approach problems the same way because that way has worked for fifteen years. A new domain — especially one that has nothing to do with your professional expertise — forces new thinking patterns.
Magic forced me to think about attention, emotion, and experience in ways that innovation consulting never had. It gave me metaphors and frameworks that enriched my business work. It connected me to people outside my professional bubble. And it reminded me that the most valuable thing a professional can do is stay a student.
If you’re reading this at thirty, forty, fifty, or any age: start something. Not something that “makes sense for your career.” Something that interests you for its own sake. The career benefits, if they come, will be unexpected and often greater than anything you could have planned.
Key takeaways:
- The method is not the effect — in business as in magic, customer experience (the effect) matters more than your process (the method).
- Practice boring fundamentals endlessly — the business equivalents of magic’s basic moves (invoicing, follow-up, delivery consistency) make everything else possible.
- Presentation multiplies product value — packaging, onboarding, communication, and brand voice can matter more for perception than technical product quality.
- Start learning something outside your expertise in mid-career — the new thinking patterns and unexpected connections often enrich your professional work in ways planning couldn’t anticipate.
- The best businesses often start from genuine passion and community insight rather than from market analysis — follow curiosity and let the commercial opportunity reveal itself.
