Meeting Butzi and charting a course that was magical.

The year was 2010 after graduating in film studies and halting my dreams of becoming a film director which I now regret. I started working in my brother’s company and made a comfortable living working 9 to 5 and living for the weekends like most of the cogs in the city of London. I felt empty and I started traveling Europe and this impulsiveness to see new things and try new things has always been strong in me since I was a kid. In October 2012 I went to Barcelona on a trip that will be life changing to say the least. I stayed at a party hostel called Jordi Sargadia Familia to meet new people and explored the city and the experience that will change my life was not artistic work of Gaudi, painting of Picasso or the great Catalonian food, it will be when I will meet a gregarious Parisian Johannes Alinhac aka Butzi who will change the whole of direction of my life.

The 21 year old Butzi I met in Barcelona

We went to a pub crawl and he made a coin vanish which was shocking for me, we became friends instantly and the next day we went to the beach together and I did one of the 3 card tricks that I have been doing since I was kid. He gave me his feedback to improve the trick and told me about his life and that he made a year long backpacking journey in South America recently and now he has a magic act and wants to make a living becoming a full time magician in Paris.

Me and Butzi in a resturant in Barcelona

For last 3 years I was making google search for boring but highly searched and profitable financial products so I suggested to him that I will make a marketing campaign for him and he can teach me some magic in return, we agreed and skyped and to my surprise he started to get calls from the marketing campaigns I made on google for him and still to this day remember the words he used on the skype call “MY BUSINESS IS EXPLODED”. It solved his problem of making a living as a full time magician which he was thinking about while I met him, which made me happy but what happened in the next few months was surprising as I didn't expect to get the eggs of magic bug to hatch and grow inside me.

He was generous enough to teach me a few tricks and guide me through the process of learning more magic and at the beach in Barcelona he was reading a book called “Magic” by Joshua Jay and he told me to buy that book. 4 years later after becoming a full time professional magician I called Joshua Jay to Bahrain to perform on stage for an event I had created.

Our Apartment Hampstead, London 2014. Living with Butzi I learn to explore new ideas.

When I lived with him all i did was learn and practice card tricks.

Our little apartment in Hamstead, London.

Johannes Alinhac aka Butzi open a whole new world of magic for me and I was so much inspired from him I stopped working at my brother’s company and travelled Europe for a month and spend 10 months in Australia just after a year I met him, doing nothing but learning magic and performing in hostels to travellers from all over the word and backpacking East Coast of Australia, next year 2014 we lived together in an apartment in London, he taught me many things about magic and specially writing to clients and how to charge and talk to clients on the phone and helped me to step into an uncharted territory of being a professional magician, also filming and edited my first showreel One - Magician Showreel (2013)

If it was not for him I would have never become a professional magician. This all started with a conversation at a beach in Barcelona. Both of us found something valuable by coming out from our comfortable known world and found marvels in the world of the unknown in a party hostel in Barcelona. Staying open to new ideas and trying new ventures could be a painful and costly experience most of the time but sometimes it could also cause a cambrian explosion which can make your life more colorful and meaningful.

I was a blocked artist and without Butzi would have been living a dull and uncreative life. And now the roles have reversed, as I was Butzi’s magic student who gave him tools of marketing and these days he asks me for advice or ideas for new magic tricks he gives me advice on marketing and promoting myself in the corporate world, and now he is part of the keynote speaking world. which is doing very well these days.

Playing a game of Chess outside Shakespear Cafe Co 2019

Here is a reminder for myself to not be afraid of going to new places and stop meeting new people or taking some risks. What do we have to lose in this short and measly life? I would extremely be very little and there are treasures waiting to be discovered.