SOLIDMAGIC

90% of everything is crap.

Alexander de Cova

Route 333

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Here is an inter­est­ing concept that struck me after read­ing this. It is ori­gin­ally not meant for magi­cians, but for cloth­ing. The idea is to keep 33 pieces of cloth­ing for 3 months (you can read the whole thing here: sys­tem 333).

The ideas is to remove the clut­ter in the closet. Remove the dis­trac­tions and the nev­er-end­ing “what should I wear today?”

If we would apply that to our magic stuff, then this could mean: 3 months with only 33 props (and books, DVDs, downloads).

Time to cut down and focus …

One big idea

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The bril­liant Seth God­in wrote in his newsletter:

“Most break­through organ­iz­a­tions aren’t built on a bundle of won­der­ment, nov­elty and new ideas. In fact, they usu­ally involve just one big idea.

The rest is exe­cu­tion, patience, tac­tics and people. The abil­ity to see what’s hap­pen­ing and to act on it. The rest is doing the stuff we already know how to do, the stuff we’ve seen before, but doing it beautifully.

You prob­ably don’t need yet anoth­er new idea. Bet­ter to fig­ure out what to do with the ones you’ve got.”

Maybe worth think­ing about in magic … maybe that could clear pre­cious space in our magic­al closets (and brains).

Cre­at­ing an act

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Right at the moment a magi­cian friend needs some help put­ting togeth­er a new show for next year. The trouble is to get the whole thing star­ted. Some­times it is good to have at least a tiny struc­ture in the begin­ning. Here is that wee structure …

create an act

Today being the 3rd Advent, this reminds me of a very use­ful tech­nique I’ver been using for years to cre­ate magic programs/​acts. It resembles a sort of rough skel­et­on. All you need is three sheets of paper, a pen and a couple of Post-its.

Label the paper sheets with “Opening”, “Middle” and “Finale”, which gives you three rough sec­tions of the “act”. Then on each one, put three Post-its, each one for one trick/​routine. Besides the yel­low stick­ers you will have some space for ideas, notes, etc.

Now write down you favor­ite tricks and routines, gags, whatever you think will be in the show. Nice thing is you can quickly change the tricks by just mov­ing the post-its around.

This is (for me) the best and most effi­cient meth­od to get a show from the desert of my mind into the real world. It gets res­ults from which to work on in no time. It is quick, easy and effi­cient. Give it a three-minute-try!