SOLIDMAGIC

90% of everything is crap.

Crack­ing Magic (1) – Intro

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There are tons of books and courses out there, even blogs ded­ic­ated to the top­ic of self-organ­iz­a­tion. But for the magi­cians, there isn’t too much on this. In the past years, help­ing oth­er magi­cians cre­ate their acts and shows, one thing has been very prom­in­ently: They don’t seem to be organ­ized magic-wise. When they have a show date, then the pan­ic starts. Rush into the magic garbage room, search for the props, decide what to per­form, get the stuff togeth­er and finally head to the loc­a­tion com­pletely exhausted. We all know it for years.

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An end­less array of books, eBooks, notes, DVDs, props, tricks, gim­micks and name it pop­u­lates their closets, base­ments and gar­ages. They seem to be lost under the pres­sure of the inform­a­tion over­load. Most of us have already lost track of what we have accumulated.

Because I know that I will con­tin­ue to help oth­er magi­cians cre­at­ing and put­ting their stuff into prac­tice, I will start this mini-series on the aspects of get­ting organ­ized in magic: How to select mater­i­al, archive it, val­id­ate it, improve it, learn it, rehearse it and finally built it into an act and per­form it.

Here we will go through all the neces­sary steps to get some order into the chaos. When you join me (and it only takes a few minutes each day, which you prob­ably would waste on Face­book) you will be sur­prised of your pro­gress with­in the next 30 days.

After that, you should be organ­ized, have a clear plan of your act(s) and have all the neces­sary mater­i­al ready to use. And you should have more enjoy­ment with your magic.

This little series is not inten­ded for the seasoned pro­fes­sion­als, who obvi­ously do have their organ­iz­a­tion already. It is aimed at the “help­less” ama­teur, who has a day job, fam­ily etc. and can­not spend the full time on magic. It is the ulti­mate “magi­cian’s hacks series”. A crash course on how to make your magic life easi­er without scar­i­fy­ing the magic­al quality.

What has to be organized?
Col­lect­ors usu­ally are organ­ized: They know what to col­lect, where to put it and they have their col­lec­tions archived some­how already. No need to tell them what to do. For the caus­al hob­by­ist per­former, things look quite dif­fer­ent. Too much stuff avail­able in the magic mar­ket, too much already bought and acquired, too much to sort out. basic­ally, I believe that in get­ting organ­ized in magic, one has to think about the fol­low­ing topics:

1. select
2. acquire
3. validate
4. archive/​store
5. modify
6. practice
7. rehearse
8. perform

In my view, it all boils down to build an archive that can be used as eas­ily as an artis­an would use his tool­box . In this archive, there will be sub-cat­egor­ies: lit­er­at­ure, video/​audio mater­i­al, moves, tech­niques and props. Addi­tion­ally some inform­a­tion on the actu­al acts or routines con­cern­ing presentation.

In this course, I will cov­er each and every aspect of that and will give you sug­ges­tions, tips and hacks that will make your life easi­er in no time.

The First Step
Nat­ur­ally, the first step with all change people do in their life is the real­iz­a­tion that such a change is neces­sary. So you will have to acknow­ledge the fact that your organ­iz­a­tion is crappy and you are liv­ing with a magic mess. And you will have to have the desire to change that. That is your decision, but then you are read­ing this so far and I sup­pose that you plead guilty and have made the decision to do the change.

And here is the first suggestion:
STOP buy­ing any magic (books, ebooks, down­loads, DVD, tricks or whatever) just for now. This does­n’t have to be forever, but only for the time until your archive is fin­ished and you have learned the tech­niques to select apro­pri­ate stuff and have your organ­iz­a­tion sys­tem installed.

As the Chinese pro­verb says: “You can­not fill a cup that is already full.” Don’t make your cup spill, it is too full already. We need an empty cup in order to install some­thing new in there.

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