On studying with a teacher

People sometimes ask me what I mean by “personal instruction”—and what sets it apart from a workshop or a digital publication.

Personal instruction is the oldest form of passing on knowledge. It is not a variant alongside book, video, and workshop, but something fundamentally different. A book preserves the abstract idea; a video preserves what was recorded once. A workshop speaks to many—and therefore to no one in such detail. Only when two people sit face to face does the material change as the student changes.

No two students are alike—not in what they already know, not in what they can do, not in where they stand. What ignites one person blocks another. No mass medium can do that. It happens only where one person gives another their undivided attention. That attention cannot be recorded or reproduced. That is precisely why it has value.

Information is everywhere today, and often free. Yet it rarely produces a magician—mostly just a collector. The difference is not knowledge, but application.

What remains description in a book becomes clear in personal instruction: the student sees live how the teacher handles the moves, which pauses they take, which timing they choose. A video can show that—in the same room it gains another dimension, because showing and seeing happen at once. And the teacher can intervene immediately when the student is on the wrong path.

My work draws on two sources. One: many years as a professional magician—stage, international lecture tours, books, most recently the BURNERS series. From that came routines I discarded and rebuilt until perhaps a single one truly held up before a paying audience.

The other is less visible, but equally important: Prof. Dr. Toni Forster, clinical psychologist and my mentor since my youth. He has since passed away, but through him I learned: people already carry within themselves the resources they need. A teacher’s task is not to give them something they lack, but to help them discover what is already there.

Both lines come together in my teaching. It is not about selling tricks, but about finding one’s own voice as a magician—a different activity from memorising routines.

Working with an experienced teacher, you learn not only what they know, but above all what they have filtered out: the dead ends every beginner walks into, and the tricks that look fine in a book but fail in practice. Years of practice add less knowledge than they remove rubbish. Alone, you often recognise a dead end only after you have treated it as the right path for years.

That is the substance of an hour with a teacher: not the sum of their knowledge, but their filter. Taking on that filter saves years of searching on your own. There is no college of magic in Germany—so the old way remains: sitting across from someone who has already walked the path.

Good instruction also takes something away. Those who work with a teacher for longer eventually stop buying everything that comes to market. They learn to tell what suits them from what does not—uncomfortable in an industry that lives on continued consumption. What remains is not a pile of tricks, but a small, personal selection. From that, a style of one’s own can grow.

Personal instruction is not a service, but a relationship. After a few sessions, a teacher often knows their student in the field they are working in better than most people in that student’s life. They see the self-image before it is spoken, hear the exaggerations and the quiet underestimations — sometimes even where the student is heading before they know it themselves.

That work happens between the words and between the sessions, often in the pauses more than in the lesson itself. It needs time, calm, and a frame both parties create—not through a format, but through a decision on both sides.

If these thoughts resonate with you, personal instruction with me is worth considering. If not, that is just as fine—elsewhere.