Should you practice magic in a mirror or on camera?

Mirrors have been part of magic practice for as long as there have been mirrors, and for good reason: you see an angle as you adjust it. But a mirror has 3 problems as a rehearsal partner.

• You're watching while you're performing, so your attention is split between doing the trick and judging it. Neither gets done well.
• You look at your hands in the mirror. An audience watches your face, and they look where you look.
• You see each moment once, in real time, and then it's gone. There's no going back to check what happened when it went wrong.

There's a subtler problem too. In a mirror you know where to look, because you know where the secret is. Your audience doesn't, and that changes what they see. Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhès cover the research in The Psychology of Magic: what people perceive depends heavily on where their attention is. That's why a move that feels obvious to you can be invisible to them, and the other way around.

The best way to avoid bad habits and fix mistakes while you learn is to get feedback right away. It provides guardrails that stop you wandering toward unfocused goals, especially if you're jumping in early and often (Rapid Immersion). After all, how can you improve if you don't know what to improve?

Daniel Kahneman spends a chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow on when an expert's intuition can be trusted. His answer: only when the skill was built in a setting with regular patterns, plenty of practice, and feedback that arrives quickly and clearly. Without that feedback, years of experience can build confidence without building skill.

The books on deliberate practice agree. Angela Duckworth lists feedback among its basic requirements in Grit, and Scott Young breaks feedback into 3 kinds in Ultralearning: whether it worked, what went wrong, and how to fix it. A recording gives you the first 2 on your own. The third is where practice exercises, and mentors, come in.

Mentors are an incredible resource if you have access to them. Most magicians don't, most of the time, and a camera is available at 11pm on a Tuesday.

1. Put the camera where a spectator's eyes would be. Seated spectator, seated camera.
2. Perform the whole trick, out loud, without stopping. If you can, turn the preview off so you play to the lens and not to your reflection.
3. Watch it back the same day, once all the way through before you judge anything.
4. Score it against the same questions every time, so this week's rehearsal can be compared with last week's.
5. Pick the weakest thing, and practice that first.

Though self-assessments can be subjective, the emphasis is less about getting a good grade and more about observing the nuances of each performance, so you can make actionable adjustments right away.

"Was that good?" is too big a question to answer honestly. Trickifi breaks it into 9 observations across 3 topics, each with a single question and a score from 1 to 5. They work just as well with a notebook.

Self-assessment isn't a perfect instrument. You know the method, so you'll spot things no audience ever would, and on a bad day everything looks like a 2. That's fine. The score matters less than the habit of looking closely, and a harsh score only costs you a little extra practice.

An inflated score costs more. Most of Trickifi's win states are difficult to falsify, but it's not a cheat-proof system. You can't get stronger by lying to a fitness app, and you won't perform better magic by lying to Trickifi.

Every rehearsal in Trickifi is recorded, watched back, and scored before you move on. You give each of the 3 topics a verdict, Looks Good or Needs Work, and anything that needs work is scored from 1 to 5 across its observations. Your scores decide which practice exercises come next, and when the next rehearsal is due.

The recording never leaves your device. It isn't uploaded to Trickifi, so your methods stay yours, and you can download it before you finish if you want to keep it. You can also switch the live preview off while you record, which takes the mirror away entirely.