My 24 year, 1000 businesses analysis...CONCLUSION.

[Millard Grubb]

I was reminded from this conversation how my performing career developed.

It was my intention, at the beginning, to prove to others in my circle that I could make a living as a performer. I had performed, here and there, just to show that I could successfully make money doing magic.

As I continued to perform, I realized that my performances were not really about fooling people.

It was about entertaining them.

This focus on entertainment made me take my technical skills and develop my performances into more of an "art" form. I wasn't just developing greater ways to fool people, but greater ways to develop the art of entertaining.

However, it wasn't until a world-class mentalist showed me a business card where he performed as a "family entertainer" and did "kid shows" that I truly became an artist of performing.

The only problem was that I had not performed for children! Up until that time, I had only done mentalism shows for adults! I had to start all over again and learn how to entertain children and family audiences.

It wasn't about tricks or illusion... It was about FUN.

I say all this because, through it all, learning the "art" of fun proved to me that even though I was at completely the opposite end of the performing venue with what I was doing... I was able to learn how to make kids and their parents laugh.

So... would this be considered learning an art? Maybe.

Perhaps this is just semantics. Word play.

I had a desire to succeed. I made 54 phone calls and booked 18 shows. Then I had to learn how to do the shows!

Fortunately, I had enough friends in the performing community that taught me how to do all these "kid shows."

My desire drove my intentions.

And my intentions allowed me to learn a new art form. So, for me, it was my intention to succeed that drove me to learn art.