The Magician’s Ego

Last night, another magician asked me for advice.

Before this starts sounding like I’m about to congratulate myself, let me add an important detail. He’s a far better card magician than I am, or probably ever will be. The sort of person who makes difficult sleight of hand look so effortless that you briefly consider taking up balloon modelling instead.

He showed me a routine he’d been working on and then asked a simple question.

“What do you think?”

Not because I know more about cards than he does. I don’t.

He wanted a different perspective. He wanted to know whether a mentalist might see something he’d missed. Whether the audience might experience the routine differently to the way he did.

Whether he changes a single thing about that routine doesn’t matter.

The fact that he asked does.

It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

The best magicians I’ve met all seem to share one quality: curiosity.

They ask questions. They seek opinions. They genuinely want to hear what other people think.

Then there are the rest of us.

Every magic club has one. In fact, every profession has one.

The person who somehow has an answer for everything.

Mention a new book and they’ve already read it. Mention a move and they’ve been using it since before you were born. Share an idea and they’ll tell you why it won’t work before you’ve even finished explaining it. Ask a question and, somehow, the conversation ends up being about them.

We’ve all met that person.

The uncomfortable truth is that we’ve probably all been that person too.

I’ve certainly caught myself doing it—not because I wanted to appear arrogant. Quite the opposite. I genuinely thought I was contributing to the conversation.

That’s the difficult thing about ego.

It rarely feels like ego. It feels like experience. It feels like confidence. It feels like being helpful. Sometimes it even disguises itself as enthusiasm.

But somewhere along the way, without meaning to, we stop trying to understand and start trying to be understood.

Instead of asking another question, we’re already preparing our answer. Instead of exploring someone else’s idea, we’re comparing it to our own.

The conversation quietly changes.

It stops being about learning.

It becomes about proving.

Here’s the irony.

The more time I’ve spent around genuinely exceptional magicians, the less I’ve noticed them trying to prove anything.

They ask beginners what they think. They ask for feedback after performances. They attend lectures with notebooks. They’re quite happy to say, “I’ve never thought of it like that before.”

Their reputation doesn’t come from having all the answers.

It comes from never believing they’ve found them all.

That conversation last night also made me ask a slightly uncomfortable question.

How do I know when it’s my curiosity speaking… and when it’s my ego?

I’m still working on the answer, but I’ve started noticing a few signs.

If I feel the urge to interrupt, perhaps I should listen for another minute.

If I’m desperate to explain how I do something, perhaps I should first ask another question.

If someone shares an idea, perhaps my first response shouldn’t be to improve it, but to understand it.

And before offering advice, maybe there’s value in asking something surprisingly simple.

“Would you like my thoughts?”

Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes they’ll simply want to share something they’re excited about. Both are perfectly okay.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how different our magic community might feel if curiosity became more important than certainty.

Imagine if beginners felt comfortable sharing unfinished ideas without worrying about being told why they wouldn’t work. Imagine if experienced performers felt just as comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

Imagine conversations where everyone walked away having learned something, rather than having successfully demonstrated how much they already knew.

I suspect we’d become better magicians.

More importantly, I think we’d become a better community.

Looking back, I don’t think the most memorable part of my evening was the trick I was shown.

It was watching someone with extraordinary technical ability openly invite another perspective.

That takes confidence.

Real confidence isn’t afraid of discovering it missed something.

Perhaps that’s the real difference between confidence and ego.

Confidence walks into a room wondering what it can learn.

Ego walks into a room wondering what it can prove.

The older I get, the less interested I am in being the most knowledgeable person in the room.

I’d much rather be the person who leaves having learned the most.