Applying LEAN Techniques to Creative Businesses with Stuart MacDonald

What if the strategy for eliminating waste and enhancing efficiency from the corporate world could be applied to magic? Join us for a spellbinding conversation with Stuart MacDonald, a one-of-a-kind magician turned entrepreneur who dared to do just that. MacDonald, whose career spans from touring as a magician to running a haunted house, to entering the corporate world and filming a documentary, shares his journey of triumphs and lessons learned.

In the labyrinth of creating a magic act, LEAN principles, time management, and inventory management become crucial aspects of the process. Imagine a thousand-part act that needs to be assembled and disassembled efficiently. That's exactly what MacDonald did, and his dedication to perfecting his craft landed him a coveted spot on  Penn and Teller's "Fool Us," while also pushing him into the top 10 at the World Magic tournament. Relive MacDonald's inspiring journey of overcoming challenges, the importance of refining his act, and how his victory opened doors to success.. This episode is an enchanting blend of magic, entrepreneurship, and the sheer power of resilience and innovation.

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Chapters

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• 29:15 (Cont.) Applying LEAN Techniques to Creative Businesses with Stuart MacDonald

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Peugeot. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, advertek Printing and IP Labs.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. I'm your host, gary Peugeot. Today we're joined by Stuart McDonald, who is an old friend of mine, going back I don't want to say how many years, but we'll say 40. And Stuart's going to be sharing to us a lot of information about lean principles. But first, stu, let's first talk about your career, because it's a multivariate and different one than most people.

Stuart MacDonald: 0:47

Yeah, well, thank you, and first of all, thank you for inviting me to this prestigious podcast. It's very nice to be here. 40 years yeah, it makes us sound older than what we really are. Exactly, we're young at heart, so my career is yeah, it's interesting. It started where, in the college years, I had worked my way up as a magician and then put myself through college with it, and then I went on tour. We toured for like 15 years and decided, eh, we want to get off the road. So we started this little haunted house and it turned out to be one of the largest in the country. It was like 20,000 square feet, and this is before. Haunted houses were a big thing, right, right. And we did that for 17 years, and then the economy started bottoming out in 2008. And so I got out of that, went back to college, the Adrian College, where we both met and went into the corporate world and started working at television stations and then ended up at a large manufacturing headquarters on the west side of the state. They make appliances I won't say who, but they're pretty, pretty, pretty big deal.

Gary Pageau: 2:19

And you also. I mean you ran your own business, you did video, you had a video company.

Stuart MacDonald: 2:23

Oh, yeah, yeah, forget about that.

Gary Pageau: 2:24

Yeah, documentaries, you were doing a lot of different things.

Stuart MacDonald: 2:29

Yeah, I had a. I also had a company called Boomerang Studios and we did like 400 TV commercials a lot of regional and local. But then the real breakout that we had was a documentary called" I want to look like that guy and it got the attention of Ronald Schwarzenegger and his whole group of people and it just went, it skyrocketed. So I'm well known in the bodybuilding community still for something that I made in 2009. And yeah, so you can look that up, it's some, you know people put it on the internet for free now.

Gary Pageau: 3:07

So it's it's thousands of links to it, but I think I've got a copy of it here somewhere. I'm sure I bought the DVD at some point and also you kind of didn't do the magician thing for years and then a few years ago you got back into it and you received some national and international acclaim.

Stuart MacDonald: 3:28

Yeah, and this is where the story gets interesting and and latches on to the topic we're going to talk about and while I was working with this manufacturer I was like man, I really was depressed, I didn't feel whole and I was like, well, when did I feel really good about myself? And it was like was when I was just getting started out in magic as a competitive magician, because I thought you kind of go up through the ranks and get noticed by producers. But the only way to do that at an older age is to be in the world championships and you have to qualify for that. And my first attempt face-planted basically in front of everybody in the industry and I mean laughing stock. I mean this guy was terrible.

Gary Pageau: 4:08

Can you explain a little bit about competitive magic I mean because that's a very narrow niche that most people are aren't even exposed to or are even aware of.

Stuart MacDonald: 4:20

No, they're not, but it will be. There's a London, a very famous London documentary company that has contacted me, and a bunch of other magicians who compete in the world championships. They're doing a documentary about it. Ok, so it will be mainstream in the near future. However, no, a lot of people don't know what this competition is and they held it every three years in a different country and the Olympics of magic essentially. Yeah, it's called FISM, the Federation of International Magician Society, and it's been around for like 85 years. And when you say these, that's competitive, I mean in Europe, it's how you make or break your career. It's very serious and especially in Asia, it has gotten so big that government states will sponsor these magicians and they will come back as like Olympic heroes and it is. It's really, it's really fascinating. I mean this isn't like you know the magic that you see a magician pulling out the quarter behind the year. I mean this is sophisticated stuff. Just to give you an idea how sophisticated, there is a guy from Italy who did his act, and with water, his, that was his theme. He was controlling water. At the end he became a hologram of water and just the water stop and. Wow, and, and, and. He didn't even Come close to placing.

Gary Pageau: 5:57

Wow, wow, and so so you. So you decide you need a challenge in your life and you get back into it and you face plant. You Do not succeed. So what's your thought process then? Because you're thinking, maybe I don't have it anymore, right?

Stuart MacDonald: 6:13

Yeah, yeah, I'm old school, right. So what ended up happening is I remembered my training at this manufacturing company, that they trained us in LEAN principles and continuous improvement, and I'm like and what does lean mean for those who don't know? Well, lean isn't necessarily an an acronym.

Gary Pageau: 6:32

It's because I see it as an acronym around, yeah you can.

Stuart MacDonald: 6:38

It has a lot of meanings with different people, but basically what it is, it's a composite of Principles that are designed to eliminate waste and create efficiency. Okay, and that's that's what lean is, and the continuous improvement part is is that you have a closed-loop system where you are constantly leaning out, putting new efficiencies in.

Gary Pageau: 7:03

So right, that's what we're so you decided that you're gonna from the training you had at this large company, that you were gonna apply these principles to your magic act.

Stuart MacDonald: 7:14

Yeah, of all things right, I'm like I didn't know how to really do it, but I the more I thought about it. Lean principles have a lot of similarity to to theatrical principles, and when I'm talking about the lean principles I'm not talking about black belt, right, I'm talking about just the very basics. So I would take, like, direct observation would be director and and on Paul would be the audience reaction either they're falling asleep, not paying attention, that means there's something wrong. So I would, I would take these principles and I would, and I would match them with theater principles.

Gary Pageau: 7:56

Okay, and it made it really easy and started looking at my act a little differently and Now for those who I'm not senior act, and I do recommend folks go on the tubes, and you know Google, Stuart MacDonald, you can find a lot of his material there. But just just briefly talk about the scenario that you were working on, that you apply these principles to the kind of the Magician storyline. You had a story to it.

Stuart MacDonald: 8:24

Yeah, at first there was no story, it was just a mirror and I and this mirror duplicated things and the accidental musician, magician.

Gary Pageau: 8:34

I think on an unintentional, unintentional magician.

Stuart MacDonald: 8:36

Okay, yeah so I ended up, after I face, planted this magician whose name is Gene Anderson, who is a retired and a very famous magician, and he he did magic throughout his entire career at Dow Chemical, but he is a PhD in chemical research and he took me inside. He said, Stuart, I want a story because nobody else is telling a story. Give us a story. So I started thinking a lot about it and I contacted a Guy who Came from Adrian High School Adrian High School and went through the Croswell Opera House Theatre that was in our hometown and the dude ended up being one of the go-to Production designers for Broadway and he nominated for a Tony for creating New Z's. All the whole production design of New Z's was his and he was just. He just finished with Spielberg Doing a West Side Story, the, the, the, the movie, so he's a pretty big deal. And I found him on Facebook and I said, hey, this is Stuart MacDonald. I want to be in the World Championships of Magic. You know it's like I'm really struggling. Yeah, can you help me out? Here's a video. Just give me some tips and I'll be out of your hair. And he said I want you to call me, what? So he gave me a call and he said Stuart, when I was in the fifth grade, you came to my elementary school, you brought me up on stage and you did the cut and restored rope trick for me and said you are the person who introduced me to theater. Hmm and I'm like, what, wow? And he said, yeah, I want to pay this back. You don't have to pay me, I really want to do this for you. And I'm like, well, I have two years before the qualifier for Busan, South Korea. And he's like, ok, well, let's look at the act. And so he looked it over and he started asking questions and he used a technique that he didn't know was lean, but I did. It's called 5Y. He just kept on asking me why are you doing this and why are you doing that? Getting into my thought process, and I was learning that my thought process had no direction, no meaning behind it, and it wasn't until he said the color of the cloth that's covering this mirror, that's duplicating things. Why is it tasly? He said it looks like an old carpet bag. And I go, well, it just looked old to me. And he goes well, that's not good enough. And he said what if it was just a simple drop cloth? And then he said what if it was? Maybe this whole thing takes place in an attic. And as soon as he said and then he said it might even be haunted. And as soon as he said that the whole thing played in my head, the whole character. It all came into place and then from there, I kept on iterating the act. Now this is 2015. And I assembled a team and I kept on sending out these videos, and to my team just my team only and they comprised of people from all different walks of life, and so I was getting opinions from magicians, I was getting opinions from engineers, I was getting opinions from just general people and theater directors, and everybody contributed in a different way. And so this technique is process mapping and it's trying to figure out. I need data. I can't do a kaizen event of myself. I mean, I know everything that I'm doing.

Gary Pageau: 12:36

I'm doing wrong Exactly, or why you're doing it.

Stuart MacDonald: 12:41

Yeah, the whole why behind it all. So once I started establishing the why and started answering more questions and the thing that I found is that when you think of lean, it's a relationship between you and your customer, so you want to put as few steps between you and your customer and the customer can be anything Like. For instance, if you have a factory, you have to have your customer as your supplier. So if you have too many barriers and too many toll gates between you and that buyer, there's a lot of mistakes that can happen. So you want to do so. I looked at my audience in the same way. I need as few steps as possible to get my story to them without them trying to figure it all out in their head and it's like why is he doing that? I don't want the audience to be thinking more questions, I want them to be lost in it.

Gary Pageau: 13:39

Right, so you don't want to create a premise where they're starting to think about well, that's a cool haunted house. Wonder where that is? Because they're not paying attention to your story.

Stuart MacDonald: 13:51

Yeah, you don't want them to think of. Who is this guy? Why is he here? You don't? It doesn't matter why I'm there. That question is answered differently in everybody's head, and then, every once in a while, you get a magician. It's like it doesn't make any sense. Why do you come on stage with a candelabra? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Gary Pageau: 14:10

Who are?

Stuart MacDonald: 14:11

you, why are you there? And I'm like well, I have nine minutes and I'm not speaking Anywhere. But, obviously I'm in a room that I can't see until I illuminate it, and every haunted house movie from the 50s and 40s always has that scenario, right, yeah, so as we started digging into the storyline, we started to have to go into waste management. Ok, because I had a lot of. When you're pouring putting a story together, you have lots of plots, right, and you have to figure out which plot is going to stick the best.

Gary Pageau: 14:52

Right, Because you had a hard stop on this. Yeah, I mean, you don't have a lot of time for this presentation, for this competition. You had what? Nine minutes to do your whole act, right?

Stuart MacDonald: 15:04

Yeah, and well, 10 minutes was a cutoff, but you don't want to get there, right? Because then you're going to see a red light. Nobody wants to see a red light, and five minutes is your minimum and all these other competitors are hitting the five, six minute mark. But my story is a little bit more complex, so I had to add more and more explanation, and by doing that, it added more complexity, and so we had to use the Tim Woods, which is the waste acronym. So time is the T part of it, the amount of time that people are waiting for a trick to happen, right?

Gary Pageau: 16:19

How many? I don't want to call them illusions or tricks I'm not sure what the actual nomenclature is, but how many were there in the final presentation? How many illusions did you have?

Stuart MacDonald: 16:31

Well, in the competition I can't even tell you how many, but but it's a lot.

Gary Pageau: 16:42

It's more than two or three.

Stuart MacDonald: 16:43

Oh my God, yeah, yeah, it's a lot of small things, it's not stopped To lead up to the mirror. Yeah, and now that it's not a competition act anymore, I've added even more elements and more skill that I wish I would have had time for before. So, yeah, I mean, you're probably looking at, you know 100 different. You know visual effects and things.

Gary Pageau: 17:10

So so, getting back to what you're saying, you had a time element you had to work with. You had to figure out what to keep and what to throw away, all continuously, all during this time. Yeah.

Stuart MacDonald: 17:21

Yes, and, and that was that. That part was difficult because you have to. You know you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but right, you know you have to. What do they call it? Kill your darlings, Right.

Gary Pageau: 17:38

Exactly, exactly. You know, just because you like it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to advance the act, or the, or the, or the show.

Stuart MacDonald: 17:49

Right. So you know when you, when you think of a Tim Woods thing, like tea is transport. You know it's like I'm transporting these, my tricks, from one part of the table to another. So what am I bring, bringing on stage? You know, I'm transporting a candelabra on stage and we had different forms of candelabra is. At first it was a chamber pot candle and we found out that after watching it over and over and over again, it's like it should be a candelabra. I mean, I just want to say that you know, the candelabras are used to illustrate how you can illuminate a room and candelabras are used for people. That in scenarios where you don't know where you're going, right, chamber pot candle is just like you know one candle. You know where you're going. You're going to go do your business and then go back to bed, right? You don't want to, right?

Gary Pageau: 18:44

I've been thinking of things that maybe at an instinctive level, would make sense, and you didn't have to explain it, it just made sense.

Stuart MacDonald: 18:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, cause it's interesting. What ended up happening is that when I went from a single candle to a candle labra, it created a lot of problems because it was easy to duplicate a single candle, but it wasn't. But it wasn't spectacular.

Erin Manning: 19:10

Mm, hmm.

Stuart MacDonald: 19:11

Right, but when you duplicate candelabra, it was like it turned into a miracle. There's like what the where the heck did that come from? Right?

Gary Pageau: 19:23

And and an increased the complexity of the illusion.

Stuart MacDonald: 19:28

It did and it didn't. It's amazing how you, how you can think your way out of a problem. Ok, when you are presented with with something that you're like, how am I going to make this fit? And you just reverse, engineer it Right. And then the other, the other part of the waste is the second one is the eye, which is inventory. So inventory is for me, inventory is as a you could look at it as prop management how many props am I bringing to the story? But it became more complex than that and inventory became just how do I transport this table and this mirror and parts and pieces? Because it was becoming a pain. Right Assemble and disassemble was a thousand parts, because it had to be less than 50 pounds. And oh my gosh, it was. It was nuts. So I came up with a system where the table doesn't have any screws, nuts or bolts. It's all caught together and the mirror is all quarter inch bolts. So if I lose a bolt or whatever, it's easy to find a quarter inch. You can. You can do that visually.

Gary Pageau: 20:45

Right, so you even extend these principles into, into the construction of everything, 100 percent, yeah, so it wasn't just the act, it was actually the construction of all the props and all of the various accoutrements. You needed to even transport it Because, like you said, you had to take this thing to South Korea, right, yes, yeah.

Stuart MacDonald: 21:05

I mean that was.

Gary Pageau: 21:05

The goal was to get it to South Korea.

Stuart MacDonald: 21:08

Right, and, and the other part too, is that you know when you're in the competition. This world competition is that you can't do any magic that's off the shelf.

Gary Pageau: 21:18

You have to invent, okay, and you can't go to the to the Magic Castle place in Las Vegas and buy some off the shelf and get really good at it and try and compete. No, can't do it.

Stuart MacDonald: 21:29

You'll be locked. You'll be locked. You'll be laughed off the stage. They will close the curtains on you. Okay, and that happened. Yeah, that created its own challenge because it gets you into five s. Five s is when you're prop building you a mass, massive amounts of just junk, from servos to batteries, to wire, to coat, hangers to you name it. There's tons of little things.

Gary Pageau: 22:02

Well, don't shatter the illusion for me. I'm still thinking this is all magical.

Stuart MacDonald: 22:06

Oh, it is. But it can become a nightmare because it's like you get an idea right and you need to find that tool to make that problem work. And if you and if that tool is hidden underneath, like some project that you did a while ago, and you didn't put that tool back where it was right, right you're, you're wasting precious time to find that one tool. And sometimes I'm like I know, I bought this prop, I know, I know what I I'm just going to have to buy a new one, and then you know. And then then you find it. Yeah, then you find, and then you got two of them, but it's like it would be. You get to the point of time management where it's like it's. It'll cost me less money to buy a new one of these things right, it's lost than to try to find it Right. So five S became very important to me.

Gary Pageau: 23:03

So explain it for the layman listening to this. What is five S Fours Gall puses? The word, the word.

Stuart MacDonald: 23:08

So 5s is everything in its place and a place for everything. That's the simplest way to. But so if you imagine and we've all seen this a very anal, retentive person in their garage and they have an outline on the wall of every tool. So if the tool isn't put back, there's an outline, so instantly they know a tool is not where it's supposed to be, it's missing.

Gary Pageau: 23:38

I'm that guy, I am that guy.

Stuart MacDonald: 23:40

Yeah, yeah, and 5s can really be very effective when it's like you cannot close the door on your shop until that tool fills that spot. Right, because you'll forget, right. And so that's what 5s is. It's, basically, and you can do that with your desk, right? I've seen guys at work that they say, oh no. I said where's your family photos, where's your Christmas cards? He goes, oh no, I just have a laptop, I can sit down anywhere and that's my office. Right, the guys that really know how to do it can really make their life a lot simpler if you 5s. Another way of 5s right is when you open up your junk drawer at home. What if your junk drawer looked like your silverware drawer, right? It's like, yeah, well, that would make sense.

Gary Pageau: 24:46

Unless your silverware drawer looks like your junk drawer, then there's a problem there.

Stuart MacDonald: 24:51

Right, but it's called a junk drawer because it's not organized.

Gary Pageau: 24:53

it's just a repository, it's the stuff you can't, you don't put in the other drawers, right? So you started this process in 2015. So when was the competition?

Stuart MacDonald: 25:06

So the qualifying competition was in 2018.

Gary Pageau: 25:10

So you had approximately three years to work this process. Did you do this the whole time, or was this?

Stuart MacDonald: 25:18

Yeah, I was doing minor competitions leading up to it and not getting anywhere. Then, in March of 2018, I was on. I was accepted to be on Fool Us, the TV show.

Gary Pageau: 25:32

Which features who? Penn and Teller. It's a national TV show on. I forgot it was ABC or somebody like that.

Stuart MacDonald: 25:40

It's on the CW and it's on YouTube, so I was invited to be on the show and if you stump Penn and Teller, then you get to work with them in Las Vegas, and what?

Gary Pageau: 25:54

does that mean stumping them? They can't figure out what it is. You did Right, that's the whole idea.

Stuart MacDonald: 26:00

That's the whole idea of being on their program. And if you don't stump them, that's like they compliment you. They say you did a really great job and it's the best way I've ever seen that trick done. But we know that trick well. So I went in there and I was like I know that I'm going to fool these guys because I invented this trick with this mirror and it's I'll just use the word it's ballsy. What I do is very ballsy and it's something that no magician has ever done before. And I'm like okay, so let's, let's give it a shot. So I do it. And they had no idea, right, no idea.

Gary Pageau: 26:44

Yeah, I've seen the segment because, like you said, it's online. You can see it and you can. Just the looks on their face was. I wouldn't say it was stunned, but it was definitely you can see. Their gears are working trying to figure it out.

Stuart MacDonald: 26:56

Yeah, and backstage I showed them how and they were like what?

Gary Pageau: 27:01

You broke the code. You're not supposed to do that.

Stuart MacDonald: 27:04

Yeah, well, you know they're your idols, right, you want to get them a little love. So, uh, yeah, so you haven't even shown me, man, well, you got to be a magician. So, anyway, so I win, and and there's these rumblings that are happening in the magic community. It's like Stuart MacDonald just fooled Penn and Tell er it's a pretty big deal. And now the competition is that summer, and and they had to be a big confidence boost for you, right, it's a big confidence boost. And I thought you know I'm going to win this thing.

Gary Pageau: 27:40

And did you? You didn't sit on your laurels, though you still continue to refine the process.

Stuart MacDonald: 27:45

Correct, oh yeah. And then you can refine it, refine it even more, and so, when the competition came around, it's in two phases. Phase one is you qualify for the Olympics of magic, and then phase two is the finals. Who gets to be the the winner? Now, this was the time where the society of American magicians, which is the S a m and the international brotherhood of magicians, came together and they called it the combined convention, and it was held in Louisville, and I was not a hopeful. They had Asian performers that were there and it was gonna be a very, very tight competition.

Gary Pageau: 28:59

Now, now give us an idea of the scale of the composition how many competitors and how many people like win.

Stuart MacDonald: 29:07

Well, in the qualifiers I can't remember how many competitors there were it was a fair number you can only only people from, like, the Asian people were able to compete in the international brotherhood of magician, but to qualify for the Olympics of magic you have to be from North America. Okay, is there? There are different seconds. I did my, my act and I got a standing ovation and I'm like okay, but I made a mate. There was a major problem, though, that nobody knew about but me, but I was really upset. My mirror wasn't set properly and it was ahead of my table rather than behind the table and some people couldn't see, and I'm like fine. So I actually had to pick it up and set it back in front of the audience and I'm like damn it. But the act was so strong that it didn't matter. So then the evening show happens and I knew something was up, because they said we want you to close.

Erin Manning: 30:12

They even had a meeting competition.

Stuart MacDonald: 30:15

They said you can put your tickets in the box for the People's Choice Award and there's 2,000 people in the audience and everybody was telling me Stu, your box, you can't get any more tickets in your box is jammed. They didn't have to count them. So when the award ceremony started, I had face planted just in the last competition and so the expectation was he might be here. I want everything. It blew the doors off of magic for me. I was a nothing and all of a sudden everybody wanted a taste of me, and so then I had one more year to refine the act. You go to Korea and the competition was solid. It was a lot of fun and my only goal was just to qualify. It wasn't the win. Winning was not part of it, because it's very subjective and the competition is so crazy, but I got in the top 10. And when you think of face planting, and then you get in the top 10 and and nobody from the Western Hemisphere was close to me, right I was like, okay, and I got a world tour out of it. So where did the world tour take you?

Gary Pageau: 31:49

Oh, where didn't it I was getting so many?

Stuart MacDonald: 31:52

offers, I had to turn them down. I mean, I had offers to go to oh it's an island nation outside of Australia, but anyway there, I had to be on a TV show there. I was supposed to be on a TV show in Italy, but I ended up going to the UK, italy, sweden, spain, china and the entire Caribbean and then, oh, I'm so sorry about that.

Gary Pageau: 32:28

Yeah, it's been really hardship.

Stuart MacDonald: 32:31

Right, it was terrible. And then COVID Right.

Gary Pageau: 32:35

Yeah, there you go and there you go. So the reason why I went to have you on not only was to reconnect because we don't we don't see each other often enough but to really kind of bring this back home towards the idea of using these relatively mechanical or rigid principles to a creative process. Right, I think that's something that a lot of people in the photo industry could benefit from. You know, if they're doing like a photo shoot, or if they're doing even if they're printing pictures, right, or you know, doing all kinds of things. One of the top three things you think somebody should keep in mind as they apply these principles to a creative endeavor.

Stuart MacDonald: 33:22

Yeah, creative endeavor. Well, first of all is get to know the principles first. Right and just high level, I would say from a creative standpoint, is waste elimination. Use the. Use the acronym Tim Woods. Just look it up, it's every. You know, it's the definition is there for you, tim Woods. I would apply that. The other thing I would apply is continuous improvement. I would find something that whenever you do a shoot, you ask yourself what could I do? What one thing could I do differently that would make it better? Right. And then there's one tiny incremental thing, and what you, what I did, is whenever I would find something that I approve upon, I'd have a penny, an empty jar, and then I'd have a full penny jar and then I would say improvement on the empty jar. So whenever you take an idea and you go, oh okay, I had an improvement, you put it in the improvement jar. So now you can actually see progressively how many times you've improved something. So you're, you're moving the needle, but you're watching it happen Because you can see. You can see it and you can feel it and it's a visual cue.

Gary Pageau: 34:45

It's almost like you're rewarding yourself.

Stuart MacDonald: 34:47

Yeah, like before you walk out of the office you go. Oh yeah, that was an idea. And then you put it in there. So yeah, small incremental changes and then they become big changes. And what I did with my act to give you an idea of how powerful that is is that I had gave myself a 30 day window before I went on the Penn and Teller Foolless and I videotaped my act 100 times in 30 days with the idea that if I improved one thing, that would be a percentage point. So at the end of 30 days my act would be 100% better than what it was. And it worked.

Gary Pageau: 35:31

Now the thing there I think is important is you had to kind of let go of the preconception of. You had to be willing to change your story right to enhance the improvements. You had to be so wed to the story that you know of the, of the magician in the haunted house, and you had a preconceived notion was going to do this, this and this because the improvements would change the story or enhance it, right, right, yeah and make it more and clarify it. So I noticed with a lot of times, with the creative people in particular right, they have their vision and they're going to lock, step, hold on that vision, like it's, you know, gripping around, you know a snake trying in their garden, right, they're just not going to let that thing go, and sometimes that can be very limited.

Stuart MacDonald: 36:22

It can be. It can be because you could be holding on to the wrong idea of when you think it's the right idea. So the third thing I would I would say is, for photographers 5s, you have so much gear and if you don't have the gear in the right place and you don't have a ritual for charging your batteries, have a ritual for your bag to make sure that you have the batteries. You have SD cards. You know there are so many things that if you leave one thing behind your screwed right or you're delayed right so you know that is something that I would say a photographer could really take to heart is to have that in your bag of tricks Awesome.

Gary Pageau: 37:11

So, Stuart has been great catching up. Where can people go to find more information about you, your magic, and your lean presentation presentations?

Stuart MacDonald: 37:26

You go to my website and if, if anything, just Google Stuart McDonald, magician and that's S T U A R T and AC M A, c yes, mac, but my website is Stuart MacDonald magic. com. Pretty easy and I'm easy to find if you type my name and then add the word magician. If you don't type my name, you'll get Stuart McDonald, the golfer, and Stuart McDonald, the, the mountain, the mountaineering guide.

Gary Pageau: 38:01

Oh, nice, did not know. Listen to me. There's only one, Stuart MacDonald. So you're it. So, yeah, well, thank you much. Great to see you again, and thanks again for being on the podcast. Oh, you're welcome Anytime.

Erin Manning: 38:16

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