I consider my run as a magician largely as a failure. Don’t get me wrong, I had a tremendous amount of fun, learned numerous transferable skills, paid bills and got to live a childhood dream.
So why the clickbait headline?
It was a failure to be a true artist with it.
Art should pull something out of us. It should transport people to a new space where they have an encounter with something beyond the medium itself. Music is wonderful for this, as is film.
I get that sometimes art is done to make a statement, call for people to reflect, or simply try to push the boundaries of what art can be (with most attempts falling really short, in my low-brow opinion). But art is something so unique to humans that it calls us to be.
Magic was fun, and while I obsessed over the art of it, I never pushed it to that level. I was an amateur masquerading as a pro, dreaming of being that artist I wanted to see. Perhaps I demanded too much of myself, but that is what I wanted to achieve at the outset. As obssessed as I was, or felt myself to be, it wasn’t enough.
And I’m okay with it because the failure was not a setback of any life metric, but a tremendous learning experience.
Besides, there are other ways to call people to be.