You may have noticed One Ahead upping its game. It's thanks to our community of paid subscribers. A year ago, One Ahead became “ramen profitable”. That's when a startup earns enough profit to cover the business costs plus the founder's living expenses. Nice.
Today, One Ahead appears to have hit “product-market fit”. That's when a startup's customers join, use, and tell others about the product in numbers large enough to sustain its growth. Hot.
Thanks to you lovely lot, One Ahead's content can be more extensive, with more voices and topics.
Besides the new monthly podcast, you can also expect the following:
- Magic Stories
- Trick Tutorials
- Magic Insights
- Opinion Pieces
Maybe one day One Ahead will serve as the front page of magic on the internet, with new stories every day and a team of brilliant writers. Sort of like a New Yorker or Vulture for the magic community. We can dream!
Today's post is an unfinished opinion about unexecuted ideas. It has a divisive title, but treat it like food for thought.
Magicians & Gods
I saw Paul Kieve at Blackpool Magic Convention. He's the wise mind behind the magic of Mathilda: The Musical and the real magic in the Harry Potter films. That's right — Harry Potter had real magic in it. Daniel Radcliffe even wrote the foreword to Kieve's book.
It was nice to see Paul at the convention. He'd been on my mind a lot recently; he'd said something in passing nine years ago that stuck with me. This passing comment was on my mind again over the past several weeks.
I met Paul when I was working with Dynamo in 2015. The project was a big magic illusion like nothing done before. Kieve was overflowing with mindful insights about magic, with a deep love for its history and art form.
At lunch one day, we mentioned someone in the industry who had referred to themselves as a magic creator. I can't remember who the person was, and it was only something we might have seen on their bio.
Back then, the industry was in this weird transition from calling everyone an artist to relabelling people as creators. Companies like theory11 had not long before made artists like Calen Morelli, Dan White, and Blake Vogt into rock stars. There was a sudden shift as more and more young magicians dreamed of becoming artists instead or as well as performing magicians.
But then, and I'm not sure why, people started calling artists creators.
Magicians who released tricks were labelled creators.
This term probably got used before then, but I noticed a shift in language around this time. It certainly feels unusual to call someone releasing a trick with a company an artist today. We'd likely call them creators.
