3 Danger Signs For Successful Magicians

You leave the group with applause and congratulations ringing in your ears. As you pack up, the client comes over and thanks you from the bottom of their heart for doing such a great job and tells you that everyone is talking about it. You feel great, and head home, knowing you did a great job.

That’s a dangerous thing to get used too.

1) Working alone, surrounded by people.

Successful Magicians working in a lonely business. They travel from gig to gig day after day, and although they perform for hundreds of people, they are separate from them. Even on large events with multiple magicians, they meet at the start while everyone sets up, then divide the room or tables and get to work. At the end, they will all met up, and motivated by the excitement and adrenaline of the evening, joke and discussed magic while the close up cases are packed. Then it’s on the road again and so it goes on. After a while, they can start to work within their own bubble, isolated from real criticism of their act or performance.

2) Believing your spectators feedback

If you are not careful, you can fall into the trap of believing all the praise you receive from your audience. You entertained them, and they loved it, but they only saw you that single time. They can’t give you feedback on anything other than that single performance. If you are starting to take shortcuts, cutting corners or just becoming too familiar and bored with your routines, they can’t pick up on that until it’s so bad, you give a terrible show. Never think that because the show went well, it means you gave as good a performance as you have in the past. You need to be introspective and critical of your own performance to guard against this.

3) Losing the fear.

Do you find you still get a little nervous before a gig?

Despite working for years, many performers still get a panicky or tense feeling before a new gig starts. That’s stage fright. It’s perfectly normal, and unless it becomes unmanageable, it is actually one of your best friends. As you go on from great performance to great performance, you can lose the fear that something may go wrong. That can cause you to stop being introspective and lessen the desire to perfect your existing material. If you find you no longer get that feeling, it may be a warning sign that you need to spend some time checking that you are still giving your work the same energy and attention to detail that you did earlier in your magic career.

Do This:

Try to get any performing video footage you can of your routines each time it’s recorded at an event. Look back on a few of these over time and see if the energy you had when you first started performing is still there.
Take your spectators praise with a pinch of salt, keep being critical of your own performance.
Look out for losing your fear of performing and view it as a possible warning sign.

Being aware of the danger of success is vital as your career in magic develops and you become successful magicians. You are only as good as your last performance, so make sure it’s consistently the best it can be.