As most great adventures, this journey began with a bit of luck and a few well aligned stars.
Like many enduring relationships, ours isn’t without its share of twists and turns, highs and lows and a few moments that we could never have anticipated. But, most of life’s best experiences come from unpredictable events. The chapters of this story contain so many random events that it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what led to the creation of The Magicians’ Collective.
Maybe it was that first email Aaron received from Diego while he was still living in California and Aaron was running the local magic club in Portland (Portland Society of Magicians), Oregon.
Or perhaps we should begin with our first in person meeting where we mostly chit-chatted and sized each other up (because that’s what men do after all! LOL).
But most likely, it was that cold and rainy night when we got together at Aaron’s place to session. Aaron mentioned he was thinking about writing a book about his magic creations and his frustrations with current magic instruction. That conversation started us on a course to try to redesign how magicians learn magic and new ideas around technology and learning methodologies.
We explored a host of ideas, but one theme kept coming up and remained constant- we realized that every teaching tool (i.e.: books and videos) was focused on the “what” and “how” of magic. In other words: teaching tricks and teaching methods. And, although there is a need to teach the methods of this art, there seems to be a large void in the educational cannon. A side that, we believe, truly holds the key to much better magic and self-expression: the “why” in Magic!
So MindinMagic was born. The idea was to build an online video-driven teaching platform where the focus wouldn’t be on just teaching tricks and methods but on teaching the creative thought process and “how” and “why” each decision in a presentation was made.
We spent hundreds of hours in research. We interview countless potential users and a lot of some of the best known magicians to gather feedback and validate our idea.
The response was great. Everyone loved the concept, the ideas, the product design, the future was here…Full-steam-ahead…and then…. CRASH!!! We just couldn’t find a viable business model to make the project work. The magic community is a relatively small market cap, content creation is expensive and logistically challenging, and its users are very fragmented. There are numerous online sites dedicated to magic and not a shortage of published books on the subject. With a heavy heart, we decided to set the idea aside for the time being.
A few months passed. We kept having our magic sessions and just about every time the topic of the “why” in Magic would keep coming back.
We spend countless hours and, many pints of beer, discussing our various ideas: What is Magic? What is Art? What is Entertainment? What is creativity? What is self-expression? The more time we spent discussing the more numerous the questions became. Every time we thought we had a definition nailed down we’d run into a dead end, make a 180 and go into another rabbit hole.
Months went by and still we didn’t really have any answers. But we did start to formulate some ideas:
1. We are having a lot of fun having these deep and philosophical discussions.
2. In a highly subjective topic like creativity, art and Magic there are probably no easy or single correct answers, if any exist at all.
3. We are probably not the only ones interested in the “why” in Magic, which was always at the core of MindinMagic.
All these discussions, thinking, and explorations for meaning and answers started to brew. What if we decided to write as a way to process and express our ideas? Even better, what if we created a community of folks where we could all write freely and share ideas with each other? We recognize that we are probably not the only ones having these conversations. We have had so much fun discussing and challenging our notions on the “why” of magic, entertainment, and art, we thought it would be an incredible experience to start a site where everyone in the magic community can come write and share their ideas so that we can all grow and evolve together.
So here we are. This begins our first post. Welcome to our grand experiment. We recognize there is a danger of ridicule and rejection, but we welcome it. As with the art of magic itself, ideas and expression don’t truly become reality until we cast them out to the world and overcome the fear of being rebuffed by our fellow contributors and readers. This we must do, because we believe that the best and fastest way to evolve our thinking is by sharing broadly with the world and seeking constructive opposing viewpoints. We welcome all of them.
Welcome to The Magicians Collective.
Best,
Diego & Aaron
p.s.: learn about our submission guidelines here.
