Learning

So I recently purchased a new amgic trick from Ellusionist. What the trick is isn’t important, what is important is what I learned from the DVD. The person who is teaching the trick puts great emphasis on making sure that people are breaking moves down into little steps. Once you break it down into little steps and practice those steps until they are second nature. This is true whether it is magic or juggling or even unicycling.

I admit that I am guilty of trying to do the big trick right away instead of analyzing what the parts are and mastering those. While not learning tricks this way hasn’t hurt me as a clown it has hurt me as a performer. I cannot tell you how many tricks I have given up on due to the fact that I couldn’t grasp one part and I didn’t look at that part by itself.

A quick list of tricks I am going to go back and relearn\retry the new way:

1. Back Crosses with clubs

2. Extreme Card Manipulation (XCM)

3. The Pass (Card trick)

4. Idling on my unicycle

I figure that those are tricks that I either gave up on or rushed through learning. The only exception is idling on my unicycle. I have been trying to learn that skill for probably 5 years. I am hoping that with my new understanding of skill learning I am able to increase my control, allowing myself to juggle\pass on my unicycle.