Blog Post #6

With time winding down until my TED Talk, I have been thinking a lot about what exactly I want to teach in it. At first I wanted only to teach what I had done and what magic I had been working on. But, after really thinking about what I had been doing for the past six weeks, I have decided to talk about what exactly it means to be successful in magic, and what you have to do to become successful. By learning what it takes to become a successful magician, you can learn to master any trick. I felt that helping other people become magicians was more important than documenting my journey amateur magician to professional master. Actually, I still consider myself an amateur...

In other news, this week, I started off by trying to attempt disappearing tricks. These tricks require more stealth and you must posses more skill to pull these off. These are two characteristics that I do not posses whatsoever! Because of this, you can probably guess what happened, I failed miserably. After trying for what felt like hours, I decided to go back to card tricks, the one facet of magic that I was actually good at. I first tried out a pretty difficult trick, one that required three major steps. After not being successful, I thought, why not try to break it down into smaller, more manageable tricks? That was my epiphany.

The card trick itself was composed of three, minor, easier card tricks. I worked on one of them, and after about an hour, I seemed to have gotten it down. After that, I moved on to the next one, and mastered that one. I then moved on to the third. After I seemed to be able to complete them all individually, I moved on to putting them all together. Suddenly, the larger, more complicated trick didn't seem like such a daunting task! I put together all three of the tricks that I had learned, and I was able to accomplish it without much of a problem. Because I believed in myself and was determined to do it, I accomplished my goal!

After I complete my TED Talk, I will post the link here for you all to see. You might see some of it during my presentation....

One more thing I would like to point out is the lesson that I have learned while trying to become a magician, is that if at first you don't succeed, you have to keep trying. Most importantly, you have to believe in yourself, because if you don't how is your audience going to believe in you?

Blogs I commented on:
Jeremy: http://jspitt.blogspot.com/
Noah: http://noahgillygeniusproject.blogspot.com/
Will: http://learning-woodworking.blogspot.com/