As part of my volunteer efforts in Macedonia, we run Facebook ads (and have an associated Facebook page.)
Occasionally, we receive messages from Macedonians who either saw our ad or found our page.
Most of the volunteers are admins of this page, so right now it’s completely down to chance who sees and replies to these messages.
Make sense?
Good.
This is where it starts getting embarrassing…
Just yesterday, I was the lucky guy that logged on and saw we had a message from a nice Macedonian lady who ‘had a question’ for us.
Now, here’s the facts…
- we get these types of messages a lot, and…
- ….I was kinda in a rush
So, I figured I would save some time and just copy and paste whatever had been sent the last time someone had asked a similar question.
I grabbed the text, pasted it in, and sent that message to the lady without thinking twice.
A day later, I looked at my response again.
To my surprise, it was NOT what I was expecting.
In fact, the literal translation of my response to ‘I have a question’ was as follows:
“It’s free! What are you cooking?”
Our friend didn’t reply. No surprises there.
(I don’t want to say they felt pretty disrespected…but it’s definitely possible)
What’s the lesson here?
Always check your work before you hand it in 🙂
In a magic context, I think we often have the habit to ‘copy and paste’ our effects…
…or maybe even perform, without taking my time to REALLY think about what we’re doing.
For instance, just the other day Jacob and I almost fell into this trap.
We were prepping for a gig in New York, and we were desperate to perform a flipper coin routine we’d learnt from Eric Jones.
Issue was, we’d only performed this routine 2 or 3 times for a live audience, and we hadn’t quite mastered it yet.
Strangely we decided to just practice all night, in hopes that we’d be ready in the morning.
Halfway through our practice, Jacob realized something hugely crucial that we haven’t forgot since:
Why are we spending all this time rushing a response, when we can just perform things we know so well, we could do them in our sleep!
The answer came quickly, and we realized what we were doing was stupid.
So here’s some advice:
Just because you like the idea of an effect is NOT always justification for performing it.
Make sure you can perform it seamlessly and don’t get carried away by lack of time!
Hope this helps you all!
Feel free to share your own experiences down below.
Benji and Jacob.