Some Professional Advice
Earlier in the week I posted a request on Twitter for professional magicians to give what they considered to be the best advice they could give a newcomer to the profession. I’ve listed some of the responses at the bottom of this post and as this is my blog I have commented on the general themes. I’ll break it down into three key areas, (it’s the engineer in me):
The Foundations.
Personal Approach
Business Approach
The Foundations:
This has to be the best starting point for every performer – develop your skill set. This doesn’t mean learn a thousand tricks and then get your business cards printed, it’s more about quality than quantity. You need the core routines that you can build your career on. For me it was the cups and balls. That one trick has allowed me to get thousands of performance hours in front of real people and it is still the bedrock of my professional repertoire, (some people think it’s the only trick I know!) The truth is that I now have a substantial body of material but without that foundation I would have spread myself too thinly and that would have made progress very difficult. If you have a desire to perform close-up then 5 solid tricks will allow you to work drinks receptions and dinners, but they must be SOLID, PROFESSIONAL ROUTINES, not shoddy pieces of crap that you think “will do.” The time you spend performing these tricks in front of a live audience will benefit you far more than the hours you could waste learning new material that will probably never see the light of day. Until you start performing you’re always practicing. Your confidence will grow and so will your reputation as a worker and that as they say is priceless. Too many magicians “buy” their careers and then try to grow into it but if you take the time to get the basics right you will be successful – it’s a universal in any business! So I don’t care if you can cut the cards twenty different ways with your teeth your still not a magician until you can stand up in front of an ambivalent crowd and entertain them with a top-change. So get the f**k off YouTube and get in front of some real people with a trick that doesn’t work itself. You’ll thank me for it!
Personal Approach:
The advice you will often hear is “be yourself.” Well I think that’s only part of the message. It needs to be broken down into more manageable chunks. I mean how can you be yourself if you have no idea who you are in the first place? I wrote about this in my last post. You need to define for yourself what it is about you that want to convey in your performances before you can be yourself. This doesn’t mean going on a retreat and taking a swim in “lake you”, it simply means that you must be comfortable with who you are and that is something that only comes with time. Confidence and arrogance are very similar in tone but are a world apart in the way they are perceived. Pat Page once called me arrogant and looking back on it he may have been right. I was close to finding my confidence on stage but I hadn’t quite crossed that line when he made that comment about me 15 years ago. I was in a part of my life as a performer that found me moving from the street into the “corporate magic” world – on the street I was confident but on stage I wasn’t and so I compensated with arrogance, not intentionally but by default. I don’t want to sound like the journeyman but it does take time and the less experience you have the more carefully you have to control your “confidence.” It doesn’t work for everyone, some people are just arrogant and all the time in world won’t change it. Which brings me onto my next point
“Be yourself” is too wide a window of opportunity, it allows you to get lazy. No-one has to work at “being them self.” You are you regardless of the effort you put in. What you should try to be is the best of yourself – always.
Business Approach:
Do you have one? What is your marketing strategy? Do you have a CRM system? Do you issue contracts with a full set of T&C’s attached? What was the last business book you read? Are you using social media to boost your profile? You get the picture.
Being a professional magician is about magic 20% of the time, about business 80% of the time and a job all the time. I’m obsessive about business (but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at it), and I’m always learning. I am far more in awe of magicians who demonstrate an aptitude for business and a true entrepreneurial spirit than a good faro shuffle. Some have both skills and I try to make them my friends. I’m shallow like that. You should approach the business of magic with the same passion that you approach the magic itself. The first will enable you to exceed your expectations in the second. I don’t believe that you have to be a starving artist to be truly creative, in fact the more on top of the day to day running of your business you are the more time and space you will have to spend on your artistic projects. Nothing kills creativity like a VAT return! And the business side of things really feeds the artistic side. To create good marketing material you need to fully understand what it is you do. Creating good sales copy that doesn’t read like a yellow pages ad is hard and a creative challenge, it forces you to focus on what it is that makes you unique. Business starts in the same way as your magic with strong foundations. A few really good clients are worth more than a hundred nameless faces who book you once. Again it’s quality not quantity. If you know Paretos principle then you’ll understand that 20% of your clients will bring you 80% of your work, so it’s important to build relationships and try not to piss too many people off. Business is about people and so is being a magician. They go very well together.
So there it is. Easy isn’t it? Get good, be nice and always answer the phone.
Here are some of the responses I got from my initial request, feel free to add your own comments, actually I insist.
Buy Michael Ammar’s card miracles 1 & 2 and Mark Wilson’s book of magic!
Get on stage. Work for free. Pay to work. The more stage time you get the better you’ll be.
As woody allen said – ”99% of success is turning up”.
Be yourself. And if that doesn’t work. Be someone else.
Try not to do to much magic ,it only upsets people.
Also remember to pay some attention to the ugly women
The tricks aren’t important, you and your interaction with audience are.
Smile
Take ur wallet with you on stage/performing
Remember your job is to entertain.
Don’t neglect the business side of showbiz!
You can’t beat getting in front of people. I joined an amateur variety group when I was 15 and did regular charity gigs. Helped me hone routines in the early days.
Don’t always listen to advice from family and friends. They’ll usually say you’re great when you’re not necessarily.
Believe in what you’re doing. Believe what you’re doing. If so, they will believe too. Your target is to enjoy, you and your audience.
Jugglers will hate you – mimes won’t talk to you – and it doesn’t matter if David Copperfield bought Claudia, Kate Moss still prefers magicians.
Buy “Marketing for Dummies” and anything by Seth Godin and read each twice. Finally, don’t copy what others are doing.
Learning to sell and market yourself is 100 x more important than learning card tricks.
Distinguish between magic and tricks! Understand rapport and confidence. Overcome fear!
Be yourself and if you think something works have the courage to do it, even if most disgree, who’s to say that they are right.
