Dominic Reyes up with professional magician Gary Jones, and he took time out to record a short video about discovering your own core skills in magic.
Gary Jones makes a valuable point here. It's so easy to feel that we need to master every move in magic. This gets reinforced as we watch other magicians perform, especially if you watch a lot of magic DVD's. We see many magicians, each performing their own magic tricks with an expert ease. In truth, we are seeing each performers BEST material. The half practiced, off the mark, or near miss material never gets the spot light. As a result, it's easy for us to assume that each professional magician is a master of all the classic techniques, and we should be the same.
In reality, each person has different strengths and weaknesses. One performer may naturally have a talent for manipulation, another may excel at palming, a third may not have much dexterity, but they are highly empathic and express that though skilled communication. Although some magicians achieve perfection across everything they work on, most tend to find a few core moves of techniques that they find easy to use. Once they have this core set of skills, they adapt and develop magic tricks that use these advantages.
DO THIS:
Make a list of the techniques that you find easy to perform.
Look at your other magic tricks and think about how they coul be adapted to use the moves you already have mastered.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Use your existing strengths, adapt your material and make the most of what you already know.
Great advice! Very overlooked insights on how you can get people to just focus on the best of what you have!