It’s all material

When I was in high school, I was a debate nerd (surprise? I think not). I competed in Extemp, short for extemporaneous speaking. In Extemp, you had 30 minutes to research, write, and memorize a seven minute speech on a given current events category. So I was pretty popular amongst the ladies.

The first day I learned about Extemp, I distinctly remember the ride home from school with my mom. I said “I’ll definitely have to use notecards, because there’s no way I can memorize a seven minute speech in 30 minutes.”

I was wrong—no notecards were used, ever. A bunch of 14-year olds were able to pull it off. The method? The speech wasn’t word for word. You still had to memorize a fair amount of information, like sources, dates, and facts. And you needed a structure. But it was surprisingly doable.

I did around 200 Extemp speeches during high school, which unknowingly prepared me for what has become a sort of signature effect of mine—memorizing names.

Last week, I wrote about how I failed to memorize 70 names. The night that article came out, I successfully memorized 100 names, twice. Then I did it two times again the next night, and the night after that. Little did I know I was laying the groundwork during high school.

Jerry Seinfeld, among many other artists and comedians, said that everything you experience in life is material that you can put on stage. This is true, even if it doesn’t reveal itself for years. Sure enough, I was preparing myself for a career in professional magic when I was all of 14 years old.

What, specifically, did I learn in Extemp that translated to memorizing names? I learned to memorize information under pressure. I learned to deliver memorized information under pressure (those are two separate skills because the memorization happens privately and the delivery happens publicly). I learned to be ok forgetting information under pressure. I learned to be comfortable making things up under pressure (To be clear, I wouldn’t just make up facts or anything in debate. But there were many times where I had to coherently ramble until I found my train of thought). And I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve had to improvise during a magic show.

There I was, from ages 14-18, doing this random activity every single weekend, and the seed of memorizing people’s names hadn’t even been planted. But I was preparing for it, totally unknowingly.

It’s all material.

That’s why it’s so important to have, as Derren Brown says, one foot firmly planted outside the magic world. Hell, have both feet out. Go do literally anything else. Because that external stuff will be material that you will use.

You can’t get great at something by only doing that thing. You can’t get good at basketball by only playing basketball games. Beyond strength and drills, you also need to learn how to be a good teammate. How to be a good leader. How to handle your emotions. But maybe you’ll also learn to cook, and that will teach you patience and the value of multiple components working together to create something larger than the individual parts. All these things that, on their surface, have nothing to do with basketball but make you a stronger player.

I’ve been working on strengthening my Achilles tendon for the last few weeks after an injury that’s had me sidelined for months. It’s interesting—for medical reasons that are pointless to get into here, but you can learn more about on this podcast—resting your Achilles tendon doesn’t make it better. Slowly loading it with weight, however, does. By adding external stimulus, you grow. That’s how your tendons and muscles get stronger. That’s how ideas get stronger. That’s how you grow as a performer. You add weight. Because it’s all material.

I think of this in terms of memorizing names last weekend. I was lucky to get to perform at the Chicago Magic Lounge, where I was given 70 minutes of pre-show time. 70 minutes turned out to be a perfect amount of time to memorize 100 names. Those 100 names were added weight. The most I’d ever done, I think, was 65.

I built a foundation for it during high school, memorizing random current events under pressure. Then I honed it by doing the trick. I let my embarrassing mistake teach me what not to do if things were going wrong. I can’t emphasize it enough, that mistake was one of the greatest lessons I have ever learned. Because now I know exactly how to avoid it. That mistake was material (literally for this Substack, and figuratively for helping me grow as a performer).

All of this culminated in what was one of my biggest successes on stage—memorizing 100 names, correctly, five consecutive times. You can see the end of one of my performances here. (The video quality isn’t great, but you’ll get the idea).

I don’t say any of this to brag, and I once again point you to this article if you want to read about me failing, miserably. I say this because this Substack is about process. And if you read last week and this week back to back, you can see clear evidence of progress.

If you practice awareness, you will bring lessons from random pockets of your life into your art. And the more that you are capable of bringing from the outside world into magic, the more robust you will be as a person and a performer.

It’s all material.