The 70% Rule

A student in the Strategic Sorcery group asked a great question last week: “Anyone suffer from a strain of perfectionism that gets you stuck at the preparation phase? How do you overcome it?”

He received a lot of good answers, including one from Chaweon Koo, who shared her 70% Rule: “When it comes to magic, I have a rule: I do it when I’m 70% ready. I’m sure many sorcerers would be horrified at how “messy” I am, but just from experience – even when I meticulously prepare, the first few times I do a ritual, I fuck it up. I learn by doing, so I just accept that for me, prep is not nearly as important as just diving in. I have the most bare minimum materia and bare altars and I sometimes miss steps – but i still get enough results that I keep chugging along.”

I LOVE this Rule and asked her if I could post it to the blog. It conveys the Strategic Sorcery attitude towards these things really well. Hopefully she will comment further on her own media, and if you don’t follow her channel WITCHES & WINE on YouTube – you should!

70% bridges the gap between the polar attitudes I see expressed in Occultism most often. The first position is that nothing but intention matters, and why would you ever study or learn the tradition when you can just talk to the spirits yourself? Why would you try to get better at talking to the spirits when every-time you close your eyes they pop in and chat with you to affirm whatever you already think? It’s AWESOME! Needless to say I am skeptical of the constant phantasmagoria that some people claim to live in, and think that there are deeper relationships to be had with the spirits than the sort of “My Buddy” thing people seem to have going on.

The other side of the coin of course are those who will not lift a dagger without reading literally EVERYTHING available on the subject and building something that conforms to the most orthodox and complex reading of those sources – even when its clearly not appropriate to the place and time that you are living. I have seen critiques of Rootwork based on the fact that the spell doesn’t look like something a slave would have been able to pull together in 1800 and evocation methods utterly disregarded because they did not follow the precise instructions of a Grimoire that in all likelihood was never worked on its own.

The “must know everything” attitude is further complicated by the increasing speed at which information is being produced. By the time you get done reading everything you can, the more there is read.

I believe that great effort should be made to learn what the hell you are doing, and 70% ready sounds about right to start actually DOING something. Splitting the difference at 50% seems lazy in a world with better and faster access to information than ever before, but ultimately your learning cannot get much further than that without actually getting your hands dirty. If you fail, you learn something. If you fuck up completely, you learn something from fixing it. If you succeed you learn that not everything is absolutely necessary, and even more importantly, what changes when you change it.

This is of course true not only for Magic but in other areas as well. Scarlet Magdelene in her new blog “Tea Addicted Witch”. She notes that when she decided to take on the Abramelin working in 2014 that she had to hold the following things in mind: I will never do things perfectly or she would never get it done. She then applies this to physical fitness and brings it right back to magic again. Go read that post. 

So, if you are on the fence about being ready to take action with magic, ask yourself “Am I 70% ready?”. If so, than time to start DOING SOMETHING.