I am standing in my living room, barefoot and in shorts and a t-shirt flipping cards back and forth in a fiddly way.
I’m practicing a thing created by Paul Harris, called the Simple Switch. Apparently, the irony is that it is really really hard (thankfully, it is actually a switch).
If memory serves me, I believe David Blaine did it on one of his early street magic specials – under the guise of showing how two cards can be switched in slow motion.
How it looks: one card from the top of the deck in the left hand flips in air over a flying card coming from the fight hand.
PH lovingly describes it in one of the AOA books.
A tip from me – the springiness of the cards makes all the difference. I can do it hundreds of times in a row if the springiness is correct. Too springy and you’ll never get the accuracy. It’s almost impossible to find a deck that doesn’t have enough springiness, though I just retired such a deck. I tend to work a deck till it’s bruised and battered and can barely move anymore. I like working with a deck that is not ideal, but more on that some other day when I talk about one of my favorite things in the world; calibration.
But I guygress.
Anyways, I’m standing there flipping the cards. I tell my daughter, we can’t leave until I’ve done 10 of them in a row without missing.
To make matters ever more matterful, I’m reciting mnemonica. On one foot (switching every ten cards). With my eyes closed.
No, sorry, cannot share video.
But it happened and continues to happen.
It’s hard to say why, but I am obsessive with practice. There are moves that I practice that I will never show anyone in a performance setting. Probably not even in a non-performance setting either.
But there are two things I’m conscious of influencing my current weird, ever-more challenging regime.
One is a current interest in brain health, and coming up with challenges to help keep my grey matters humming along better than they ever did. I practice as many sleights as I can with both hands (not all, not the Simple Switch). I’ve been doing this since I was a kid for one simple reason, it just never felt right to only do things with one hand. I def have a dominant hand, it’s just that I had this feeling like I was incomplete if I didn’t learn most things with my other hand.
Recently, I found a fringe-y thing called Whole Brain Power that promotes this kind of challenging both hands with feats of dexterity. So I combined that with my daily sleight of hand practice, increasing complexity and also amount of tasks at same time.
The interesting thing, in my highly un-scientific observation, is my Simple Switch got better when I started reciting mnemonica while switching. Then adding in the standing-on-one-foot and eyes-closed weren’t really that big of a deal for some reason.
The other interesting thought that has always been in my head, that powers the rest of the practice is something I either heard or read the great meditation teacher Shinzen Young say one time. It was this: You can ride the smile all the way to enlightenment.
To many, that will seem like some kind of un-explainable koan. Not so. What he means is, you could be so fully present to every movement of your face making a smile, you could see the micro-movements, how things rise and fall, see the intentions driving the muscles, etc. that by just focusing on that you could become “enlightened.”
Although I spent several years studying meditation with monks and practicing for hours every day, I now come to believe that using whatever you are doing as a kind of hardcore meditation is far better than any “sitting” meditation. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I won’t snore you down here about it. We can talk about this some other time.
So putting those ideas together, that you could practice focusing on every movement you’re making and also the intention of challenging my mind each day in novel ways, led me to really focus on my practice of Simple Switch.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot more fun than meditation.
So this is my meditation. There are other things to talk about that I use this practice to super-charge: awareness (in most situations the more aware you are the better), no thinking (magicians are notorious for being almost surgical in their conscious thinking, therefore missing out on some of the fruits of practice), naturalness (no on can teach this to you, and you learn it from doing things 500 times over and over)….among other things.
But why do I want to tell you this? Well this practice of doing the Simple Switch also requires I practice a superskill that can and should be applied to all other areas of life.
You see, I have to visualize what I want to do before I do it, in this case the Simple Switch: I must know exactly what I want to do and be able to visualize it, feel it.
Next step, I have to organize my body in a way that will accomplish the thing I am visualizing, feeling.
Once I have success, I have to figure out how to replicate that success over and over again. What makes the Simple Switch so difficult is the amount of micro-movements and positions that have to be exact to get consistent results.
In other words, this whole practice is a masterclass in mastering yourself. Your awareness, your mind, your body, your ability to visualize something then create it, and the ability to focus on one thing for long periods of time.
Does any of this sound familiar? This is the basic foundation for accomplishing anything in life.
Learn The Simple Switch and win life.
If you like the sound of this, then you’ll like my new free book about how Magic taught me to create, make more money, enjoy life nore and generally be more successful. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more here.
