Making Magic New Year’s Resolutions Stick

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This blog post will be published on the 1st February, by which time the New Year’s Resolutions of many people will have long since been broken! We all start off with the best intentions to lose weight, or to go to the gym more, but life soon gets in the way and it’s all too easy to fall back into the old ways of behaving. It’s human nature.

But what about magic resolutions? Do you make any at the start of the year in the hope of making more out of your hobby, or of learning some new skill, or of catching up with your magic reading? Do those resolutions suffer the same fate as the more general ones? Probably.

So what’s to be done? Well, if you are genuinely serious about resolving to improve your magic life (or your general life, for that matter), there is a way of structuring your behaviour that may enable you to actually achieve your aims. Here are my suggestions. Continue reading “Making Magic New Year’s Resolutions Stick”

Magic Imagination – The Key To Creativity

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If you aspire to being a bit creative with the magic that you do and you want to make your performances different from your competitors, it requires that you come up with ways to devise plots, or presentations, and maybe even methods, that will break away from the norm.

There are lots of ways to start the creative process (my E-Book A Simple Guide To Creativity offers you lots of suggestions), but the underlying requirement is that you need to have a good imagination. Without at least some ability to daydream, you are likely to remain stuck with what has gone before, because inspiration may not just happen automatically when you need it to.

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Why Magic Needs A Context

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I might be old fashioned, but I do prefer magic that has a context or a framework for the impossible event that is happening. For me, a visual piece of magic eye candy is nice, but ultimately less satisfying than an effect which builds through presentation to a satisfying magical conclusion.

Magic is, of course, totally illogical. Most effects that we create have little foundation in reality, and it is that very fact that makes it interesting. If magic was no more surprising or interesting than using a remote to ‘invisibly’ turn on a TV, then it wouldn’t be something that anyone would be prepared to pay to witness.

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The Power Of A Positive Magical Peer Group

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I have always been of the opinion that who you mix with can have a profound influence on the type of person you are and the attitude that you portray. If you are surrounded by upbeat, positive people, the chances are that this will probably rub off on you and your glass will generally be half full. Spend most of your time with those who find reasons not to do things and for whom everything is a problem that can’t be solved, and you would do well not to become similarly negative.

As in general life, so in magic. When I think back to my early formative years in magic and the people who I met and spent time with during that period, I can clearly trace the positive impact that they had on me. Their knowledge, attitude and drive were terrific role models and had I not hung around with them but chosen the company of others instead, there is no telling what direction I might have ended up taking.

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