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I read somewhere that professional writers care more about crafting effective writing than they do about being good writers, and as a result, they can receive criticism from anywhere and improve their writing until it’s highly effective.
I think it’s the same with magick: To develop something truly effective, you have to stop caring about being a good mage. Because if you’re caught up in wanting to be a Good Mage, it’ll be painful to expose your magick to real tests*.
*Real tests = Tests it might fail. Yes, tests it can’t fail are fake tests.
But once you care more about effective magick, you can honestly say what effective magick would look like, and see ways your magick isn’t there yet. Which is the first step to getting it there.
Do I care more about effective magick than about being a good mage? I try. I even succeed a fair amount. But it takes work. If it didn’t, there would be no need to discuss it.
Thoughts?
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Well some great mages have passed tests. But to get there they had to train themselves for decades. So is not that encouraging if you ask me… For the other hand, some Chaos Magicians test their results and center their practice on the effectiveness of their magick. But its also limiting without the “background” knowledge like the one in your page.
When I say “test,” I don’t mean some epic, 40-years-in-the-desert test. I just mean making a concrete prediction, then honestly saying whether your magick worked or not, and trying to improve it. Yeah, it takes longer to do that than it does to pretend you got results, but really, which would you rather do?