Craig Petty is back at the Café and he shared this great advice. His new section is way down in the same area as the Wizard Product Review, but I wanted to bring this link up here for all the new magicians to check out.

http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewt......orum=386

Who would do such a thing?

Good question, but you see a lot of it around the forum. You would think fear of utter failure would at least put a stop to some of these doomed plans. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, there are people that press on. I guess the answer to your question might be: people that for some reason think they can pull off something that is made to look easy by another person with years of experience. They see a magician on TV or locally and think, "I can do that!" without realizing all the years of practice, study and preparation involved behind the scenes.

Maybe there are several contributing factors. Hubris, narcissism, genuine lack of understanding. Lack of respect.

There is a time when you have to take the plunge and do a gig without ever having done one; we all have first gigs in different venues: first children's show, first walk around, first restaurant, etc., but even that should come after hours and weeks and months and years of study and practice. After some free or very low fee gigs, etc.

Anyway, I think Craig had lots of good advice in that few minutes and you have a good question, so I won't keep going on.

Thank you for sharing. This is great advice that some people learn the hard way.

Cheers Theodore. I agree! I can't imagine what courage/arrogance/stupidity it would require to walk in front a of a paying public utterly unprepared and try to entertain them with magic. Can you imagine them doing that in other lines of work? Totally unprepared and thinking they'd give flying a plane a go, or driving a bus, or teaching physics, or stand up comedy, or juggling, or, well, pretty much anything! Madness!

Good points. Just like anything in life, you must spend the time to prepare in order to be successful

I think part of the problem is how magic is sold. I have heard many times buy today and do it in hours. People think magic is quick and easy.

True. I think the internet contributes to that problem also. It's a difficult balancing act to say that magic is easier than some people think, but a lot harder than others think.

That's a great comparison Terrible Wizard; to look at performing magic unprepared versus any other occupation. More new magicians should look at it through those eyes if they want to be successful. I hadn't looked at it like that before, but yeah, I wouldn't step into any other line of work and expect success; why would anyone think magician should be any different?

In regards to what Andy said, that's another great point. Magic advertising has always been sketchy, promising you the moon and the stars and people fainting from astonishment or promising to be so easy you will be doing it in five minutes. A look at old catalogs is nostalgic for me, and also funny because of the ridiculous hype in the ads. Then you would get your new toy and realize you had been ripped off. The new review shows and blogs really help to eliminate a lot of the false advertising that state how mind-blowing the trick might be, so now it seems the focus is on doing it with no effort.

The truth is that the trick may be so easy you can "do" it in five minutes. It may be self working or the sleights may be easy to do. The challenging part lies in the performance of the trick. Performing and doing are two different things. Performing demands that you to entertain your audience. You're either a real magician who gives lots of time to figuring out how a trick fits your style and routine and who spends time coming up with a presentation that makes it your own and makes it entertaining, or your a hack that adds to the ever-growing list of people that do tricks right out of the plastic Ziploc and give magic a bad name.

You can even be a part time hobbyist and still be a real magician, someone that gives it the time and effort it deserves.

I'd love to see a company use a new ad blurb that states something like: "You can do it in five minutes, but why on earth would you?!" or "No skill required in the moves, does require expert level showmanship!" "You know that guy that presents magic horribly, don't be that guy." You get the idea.

Good post! Love the advertising lines at the end, lol

This is a fantastic subject. I watched Petty's video - it was great. Many years (it was in the 70's), we had a magician come to our club and lecture. He gave us pretty much the same lecture, and he was right. As far as the magic advertisers from the past and present, they are appealing to the hobbyist besides the more serious magician. I have encountered many people who do not do magic all the time, but they had like one or two tricks that they did for social settings, and they all did them great, because they knew that one trick and how to do it well. Which reminded me of a video of Chris Pratt, who was on a talk show, promoting the latest movie, and the host asked him to do a trick, because he had heard that he was a bit of a magician. The host handed him a deck of cards, to which Chris proceeded to perform a killer trick that fooled me at that moment. The point is that he did a great job and did not do harm to magicians, but helped elevate the view of them.

Thanksssss. wohoooooo! ive been searching for some of this,