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A couple of days ago, I saw a card trick that was so good it made me cry. 

Ok. 

Let me give you some context:

Outside of writing emails for What Counts, my day-to-day business is designing magic tricks and selling them to magicians. 

I recently spent a week at the Blackpool Magic Convention—the world’s largest gathering of magicians—and had the chance to sit down, chat with, and watch some of the world’s best magicians up close.  

Since this newsletter is dedicated to investigating the science of self-development, I wanted to share a couple of lessons I learned from these world-class magicians about what it takes to achieve mastery. 

Whether you’re an athlete, a magician yourself, or just anyone interested in developing their ability to learn new skills and perform on the highest level…these insights should be useful. 

The Card Trick that Made Me Cry

Dustin Grimm is a German magician who specialises in a certain type of close-up magic that I also specialise in. A couple evenings ago I sat down and watched him perform a few tricks for friends. 

As someone who has studied many of the techniques he was using, I knew exactly how hard everything he was doing was. These were incredibly complex methods, but he made them look so effortless.  

To anyone else it might have looked no different to another card trick, but I knew I was witnessing mastery up close—and it made me a bit emotional, to be honest.  

There’s something about mastery that we’re all drawn to.

And the funny thing about it is—it almost doesn’t matter what someone is a master of, it’s just the mastery itself we like to see. 

Sure, it’s inspiring to watch an Olympic sprinter’s years and years of practice come together for ten seconds of mastery as they run 100m faster than anyone else in the world. No denying that. 

But it’s just as beautiful to watch a great chef finely dice an onion, or an F1 mechanic switch out a tire…or a card magician do a card trick. 

There’s something innate in us that loves watching people who excel at their craft—people who have dedicated more hours than we can fathom to something they’re passionate about. And something in us that wants to find that mastery in our own lives too. 

The Coin, The Tab, and 18 Years of Obsession

Another magician I met is Johannes Mengel. 

He’s an Estonian magician who has spent 18 years refining his ability to do ONE trick—magically make a tab from a borrowed can melt through the bottom of the can. 

He’s really, really good at it. 

(In fact, the day before he performed the effect for me, he performed it for David Blaine, who also loved it.)

Johannes told me that he spent so long on this idea not so much because he loves this particular effect, but more so because he loves the feeling of aiming for and achieving mastery of something. For him, it happened to be mastering the art of magically transporting an object inside a borrowed can. But he said it doesn’t really matter what the ‘thing’ is—what he loves is the challenge, the pursuit. 

Three lessons on mastery 

If you’re not a magician, what lessons can you take away from this email about achieving excellence in your craft?

Here are three…

Dustin told me that he spent a whole year simply performing one kind of magic so that he could explore everything he felt there was to explore about it. 

Johannes told me that he was so focused on his ‘can routine’ that he never even bought a deck of cards or learnt any other kind of magic. Rather than going wide and shallow with his interests, he went narrow but deep. 

Either way, the pattern was simple: they focused and stripped away distractions. 

Both Dustin and Johannes have obsessive personalities. Once they find their focus, they’re able to sustain long periods of just working on that idea over and over beyond the point most people would give up. 

Johannes told me that when he showed other magicians his very first version of the ‘tab and can’ routine, they told him it was amazing and good enough to publish to other magicians. But he wasn’t satisfied with ‘good enough’ and kept going until he literally felt he couldn’t improve it any more than he had. Once he reached that point, the original idea he’d shown magicians all those years ago paled in comparison to what he’d discovered—and didn’t even make it into his new project.  

Whether these magicians achieved mastery because they are obsessive by nature, or they became obsessive in the pursuit of mastery, I’m not sure—but it’s definitely there.  

Dustin and Johannes both share a common trait—they find their pursuit fun. They have a playful, enthusiastic energy to them. 

Johannes told me that his best tip for getting into a creative state of mind—the kind of creativity required to create great magic tricks—is to allow yourself to just slip into a childlike, playful mentality. Don’t limit yourself by what you think you know, just play. 

Dustin genuinely loves performing magic, and you can see by the way his eyes light up when he’s performing that he’s also slipped into a state of play. 

This is needed, I think 

Achieving mastery in anything requires a huge amount of time and work. So much time and work that if you’re just trying to achieve it for the sake of it—while it’s possible—it’s a very daunting prospect.   

But if you find your pursuit to be intrinsically rewarding—if it feels like play to you—you won’t even think about the time or notice it passing. 

So find something that feels like play and that will be something you can do forever—which will inevitably lead to mastery, whether that’s your goal or not. 

Ok. 

Those were the tips. 

Hope you enjoyed this email. It was a little different to the usual emails but I hope you found it useful.

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Your friends,

Benji and Jacob

P.S. If you want to watch these magicians in action, go to our YouTube channel here.