ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laido Dittmar
Fourth-generation circus performer. Juggler with Cirque du Soleil and Recirquel. Author of The Art of Practice: Same Effort, Twice the Progress, Any Skill.
I come from a Hungarian-Russian circus family, and for generations the circus has been the family identity. My parents were both acrobats. My mother performed with the teeterboard group “Doveiko.” Growing up, I was tried on every skill a circus child gets tried on, acrobatics, unicycle, ladder, handstand, juggling, and I seemed equally untalented at all of them.
I started juggling at 17, which in my world is a decade late. Most professional jugglers start at six. For two years I practiced eight hours a day, five days a week, and made almost no progress. At my first performance I dropped 17 times, more drops than I had tricks. A visiting juggler was asked how long it would take me to become decent. His answer, said loud enough for the whole training hall to hear: “In ten years, he might become a good amateur.”
I gave myself two years to prove him wrong or quit.
What I found
I read everything I could find on sports psychology and success. I interviewed the best performers who passed through Budapest, and every one of them gave me the same useless answer: work hard and love what you do. They could not tell me what they did differently because they did not know. It came naturally to them.
So I stopped asking and started observing. I took notes on what the best did in their sessions and what the strugglers did, in juggling first, then in every discipline I could get close to. The differences were small, counterintuitive, and universal. They had nothing to do with talent. They had everything to do with the order, the priority, and the strategy behind a practice session.
When I rebuilt my own practice around those patterns, my progress changed within days. Not months. That system became my career, and later, the book.
The career
I trained as a self-taught artist in Hungary and Russia, where I was invited to study as the sole foreign guest at the Moscow Nikulin Circus. Since then I have toured internationally with my signature act, “Dreamlight,” and worked with Cirque du Soleil and Recirquel.
- Best Juggler Award, World Circus Cup 2026, presented on behalf of Cirque du Soleil Casting
- Hortobágyi Károly Award, 2024, a Hungarian state decoration for contribution to the circus arts
- Outstanding Hungarian Artist of the Year, Karádi Díj, 2022
- The Star of the Stage Award, Porond Csillaga Díj, 2017
I am one of four jugglers in the world to have flashed ten rings while balancing a ring on my head, the image on the cover of the book, and the second to flash seven ring backcrosses.
The book
The Art of Practice distills two decades of observation into seventeen principles that apply to any fine or gross motor skill: music, dance, martial arts, sports, circus, and everything else that has to be practiced to be learned. It is not a book about working harder. It is a book about what the people who improve fast do differently, and how to do it on purpose.
More than 14,000 practitioners have read it. The practice guides on this site are written from it, discipline by discipline.