One Foot In, One Foot Out
Keep half your life outside your craft so you have the leverage to move it somewhere new.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 84%
Brown's account of why his work stopped looking like everyone else's. If you have both feet in your craft, the thing feels so huge and expansive that you are overwhelmed by it and cannot move it anywhere. Keep one foot in it and the other in the rest of life, and you have leverage to take it somewhere interesting. He is candid that magic in itself is a childish way of impressing people with little inherent value — so the question becomes what you can bring to it. In practice that meant importing Stoic philosophy, painting, psychology and his interest in how people fool themselves, and insisting every show is about something else.
Origin
Brown traces it to being an outsider as a kid — a feeling he says you start to value as you get older and eventually treat as a bit of a superpower — and to being told on magic forums that what he did was not even mentalism.
Core principles
- 01Total immersion in a craft removes your leverage over it.
- 02The craft itself may have little inherent value; the value is what you bring to it.
- 03Follow your nose for what feels fun, interesting and worthwhile.
- 04Let the work grow up with you rather than freezing it at the version that first succeeded.
- 05Outsider status, held onto, becomes a competitive advantage rather than a wound.
How to run it
- 1
Keep genuine interests outside the craft
Maintain real pursuits that are not your work — Brown's are painting, writing and reading — and treat them as load-bearing rather than as leisure to be sacrificed when the work gets busy.
- 2
Decide what the work is actually about
Make the piece about something beyond the technical display. Brown says he makes sure the shows are about something else, something of value — Showman is about how the difficult things in life are the things that join us up.
Pro tip The subject should be something you are genuinely working out for yourself, not a theme bolted on for depth.
- 3
Import the outside interest into the craft
Bring the external passion physically into the work. Brown paints a portrait of a famous person on stage, upside down, and flips it round at the end — a magic effect that only exists because of a non-magic skill.
- 4
Ignore the purists and let it grow with you
Accept that people inside the discipline will say this is not really the discipline. Brown found magic forums complaining that what he did was not even mentalism, and treats letting the thing develop alongside him as the main reason it has lasted.
Watch out Do not let category policing set your scope. Brown's point is that nobody knows what the word means and nobody cares.
In the wild
In his stage show someone comes up and thinks of a famous person; Brown paints a picture upside down and flips it round at the end. Steven Bartlett's reaction was that what stunned him most was how good a painter Brown is — the non-magic skill carrying the magic moment.
→ An effect no purely technical mentalist could produce, built entirely on a passion imported from outside the craft.
Brown had his book on happiness — essentially a book of Greek philosophy — come out the same month as a ghost train he created at Thorpe Park. He remembers thinking he had no idea what job allows for those two things, and that it certainly is not mentalism.
→ He takes the unclassifiability as the point: letting the thing just be him rather than being driven by the limitations of a category.
Common mistakes
Making the work about how clever you are
Brown identifies “hey, look at me, aren't I clever” as the bottom line of most magic, and says it might be interesting for an audience once and then that is it. Without an outside subject there is nothing to sustain interest.
Both feet in
When the craft is the entirety of your world it feels too huge and expansive to move, and you end up defending its internal conventions instead of taking it anywhere.
Is it for you?
Best for
Specialists whose work has become technically excellent and creatively stuck — performers, designers, writers, founders in a mature niche.
Not ideal for
Beginners who still need total immersion to reach competence, and fields where deviation from convention carries real safety or compliance risk.
From the transcript
“if you've got one foot in that thing and your other foot in the rest of life, at least you've got some leverage then to…”
“And I just make I make sure the shows are about something else. You know, Showman is about how the things in life that are…”
From the episode
Derren Brown: UNLOCK The Secret Power Of Your Mind!
Derren Brown