Ed Sheeran’s Theory on Producing Magic Tricks

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I Wrote a Book About Magic Ideas

I was in Los Angeles, about to travel back for a television project when it suddenly cancelled on us. That was that. It happens quite often in telly—three months worth of work gone overnight.

I turned to my iPhone notes in a moment of potential madness and compiled trick ideas into a book called Only Ideas. Geraint Clarke told me the book needed an intro section with some magic theory, so I wrote that and added it.

I spoke to some big magic companies who told me there was only a limited 100-300 magician market for a weird little book like this. I chose to self-produce, and at the time of writing, there are 1,434 magicians around the world with that little blue book. It even landed me a job working for Netflix. I am extremely grateful.

Here were my thoughts on ideas

1 in 100 ideas will be good.

1 in 1,000 ideas will be great.

You can never improve these ratios; you can only improve two things.

Taste; How well can you identify a bad, good and great idea.

Speed; How quickly can you power through the bad ideas to get to the good and great ones.

Ideas are worthless; execution is everything.

Share your ideas with everyone.

Execution is Everything

Execution is where the value is. And it’s also what a surprising number of subscribers want me to write about. And I will, in great detail, over several newsletters.

Today, I’m going to talk you through my thoughts on producing magic tricks. Only, they’re not my thoughts; they’re Ed Sheeran’s.

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it took me hours to find this clip, and I couldn’t even get you a video. Listen to the podcast or read the transcription below.

“I kind of view songwriting as a dirty tap in an old house, because you switch on the dirty tap and it just spits out shit water for about ten minutes. There’s just mud and and grit and just all sorts of messiness flowing out. And then it starts flowing cleaner water and little bits of grit come flowing out. And then after a while, it’s just clean.

And, when I first started writing songs they were terrible. And that was the mud and grit coming out, and I was unplugging and unplugging it. And I tried to write two or three songs a day for a while, just unplugging, unplugging and unplugging. Now and then I’d get a good song stick out. And that was the first bit of clean water coming out.

And then once all the bad songs had gone, the good songs would start flowing. Now and then I’d write a bad song, but I think the key is that when you think you’re writing a bad song, just get it out of you. Because if you don’t, your next song will have a bad part in it. Just view it as a constant stream. Try and write a song a day, even if it’s terrible, just get it out of you.

The best songs you write will be in five years time.”

-Ed Sheeran

Nick Popa has a fabulous beard.

Nick Popa has a fabulous beard. It’s a wonderful, beautiful big beard. Over the weekend, a group of magicians like DK, Josh Janousky, and Ben Prime were all on a call with myself and Nick and Nick’s beard.

For a laugh, I started pitching the group some beard based magic tricks. It was brilliant fun to revel in their laughter and see their faces as I pitched the most horribly, wonderfully terrible ideas.

My favourite one was a gipsy thread with his beard hair. Getting a spectator to pull six individual hairs from his beard with tweezers. Then balling them up around one hair attached to his face, then restoring them together into one super long hair fixed to his chin. What a beautifully bad idea.

My second favourite was building a money printer illusion into some hair straighteners. So Nick could run his beautiful brown beard through the straighteners, and it could come out the other end as beautiful beach blonde hair. Look at that, we just invented a colour changing spectators hair, with a proven method.

These were only ideas. But this newsletter post was on my mind; I try to write the first draft of these on Sundays.

I thought to myself. I love this. It felt like comedians laughing at each other’s terrible jokes and thriving in the process.

I love building anything from start to finish: apps, companies, board games, television shows, musicals. I absolutely adore the process. I feel like I’m learning and challenging myself at every turn. I’ve learned more from the terrible projects than the good ones. The people who are the best in the world at producing magic absolutely adore the process, from start to finish.

Learn to Love Building All Kinds of Magic

Here’s what I have to add to Ed Sheeran’s thoughts on songwriting. Really embrace those bad songs. Adore every second, don’t stop because you think something is a bad idea; push through it. Get it out of your system. You’ll learn more from them or turn them into good tricks.

Tom Elderfield is a great friend and brilliant at executing tricks from idea to reality. He won’t wince at all when he reads that he’s shown me some of the funniest, dumbest, stupid magic I’ve ever seen in my life. But he adores it. He knows how silly and stupid some of these are, and that’s why he’s showing me them. He learns by making them, even if he knows they’re maybe only fit for one TikTok or just a Whatsapp message to a group of magicians. Heck, I learn from watching these.

Calen Morelli shared a story a while back about the number of tricks he’s produced and how many you have to produce to be at his god-like level. Whilst I do think he exaggerated his number. The number of tricks I have produced from start to finish is in the hundreds for sure. There are tricks I have spent days on and thousands of pounds of my personal funds that will never see the light of day.

Eight years ago, I spent 42 hours of my life building a fire escape prop. I made the little man in the sign sprint out of the door on command. It took a few attempts. I had to drive the two-hour round trip to the store three times. I had to order lenticular sheets online and learn to use photoshop to animate the dude’s little legs. Then I figured out how to slow an electric reel such that the little man didn’t fire out the other side of the sign after running behind the door.

Then I asked my friend Ollie to drive me into Bath, to a shopping mall. We glued the prop to a wall, and I filmed it from a few metres back. When I gestured my hand, he triggered the reel, and the little man ran out of the door.

Not many magicians used electric reels then, and I’d never seen a magician use lenticular before. The trick was cute but a bit useless, and I think many people would say it wasn’t worth the financial or time cost.

But I loved it, and I learned a lot.

Everyone can appreciate effort. If a bad trick has clearly had a lot of work put into it, magicians will still take notice, and it’ll help you land consulting gigs for sure. Effort is universal. Whilst you and I might have different opinions on some artwork in a gallery, we can probably both look up in awe at any artwork painted up the entire side of a twenty storey building.

The Best Tricks You Produce Will Be in Five Years

The sooner you accept this to be true, the more you will enjoy producing magic tricks. Learn to love the bad songs. Produce magic for yourself because you love producing magic.

So much about magic is a performance. And so if you create a trick and feel unable to show anyone it, it can feel like a disappointment. Find friends you can show the bad ideas to, who can appreciate the details or laugh at them with you.

Produce magic all the time, even the bad tricks.

The best tricks you produce will be in five years.

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