There are moments in your reading life when a story hits you so hard that you physically stop. Your eyes leave the page. You stare at the wall. Something rearranges itself inside your head, and you know that the way you’ve been thinking about something fundamental has just shifted.
The Mary Ann Smith story in Ken Weber’s “Maximum Entertainment” was one of those moments for me.
I read it in a hotel room — of course I did, that’s where I read everything — and I set the book down and sat with it for a very long time. Not because the story was complex. It’s actually quite simple. But because the implications were so direct, so devastating to the assumptions I’d been operating on, that I needed time to let them settle.
Let me tell you the story, as Weber tells it, and then let me tell you what it did to me.
The Investment Conference
Weber describes an investment conference — the kind of event where high-powered business people gather to hear presentations, network, and evaluate opportunities. The conference organizers had hired a professional close-up magician to entertain during one of the social functions.
The magician arrived in costume. He had all the props. He had the techniques. He had the professional presentation package that says “I am a hired entertainer.” He performed his act.
And he was ignored.
Not heckled. Not challenged. Ignored. The audience — sophisticated business people with a hundred things on their minds — watched politely for a moment and went back to their conversations. The magic was competent. The techniques were clean. But the experience was weak. The magician had focused on mystery rather than entertainment, on the puzzle rather than the person. He’d brought his craft to an audience that didn’t care about his craft. They cared about having a good time, and a series of close-up puzzles performed by a stranger in a costume didn’t constitute a good time for this crowd.
That alone would have been a useful cautionary tale. But Weber doesn’t stop there.
The next morning, a different kind of speaker took the stage. Her name was Mary Ann Smith. She was a regulator from the SEC — the Securities and Exchange Commission. By Weber’s own description, she was “frumpy.” She had no props. No tricks. No costume. No technical skills related to entertainment in any traditional sense.
She had a voice. She had sincerity. She had an absolute, burning desire to communicate something to the people in front of her.
And she was magnificent.
Weber describes the scene: several hundred high-powered business people, the kind of audience that is famously difficult to engage, sitting in rapt attention as this government regulator spoke. Not politely attentive. Rapt. Captivated. Leaning forward. Laughing. Moved. She hit every note — timing, enthusiasm, humor, emotion, surprise, enlightenment. She had, in Weber’s analysis, “all the entertainment cylinders firing.”
When she finished, the next speaker walked to the podium. The next speaker was former President George H.W. Bush.
And the first thing he said was: “Wow, that’s a tough act to follow.”
A former President of the United States acknowledged that a frumpy SEC regulator was a tough act to follow. Not a rock star. Not a famous comedian. Not a celebrated performer. A government policy wonk who had mastered, apparently without formal training, the art of connecting with an audience so deeply that one of the most powerful people in the world felt the pressure of her warmth still lingering in the room.
What Stopped Me Cold
I read this story and I felt something shift. Because I recognized myself in the magician, not in Mary Ann Smith.
I was the guy with the techniques. The guy who’d spent two years perfecting the craft. The guy who showed up with the skills, the methods, the polished execution. And I was being outperformed — not hypothetically, but actually, regularly, in the real world — by people who had none of those things but who could connect with other humans in a way I hadn’t learned to do.
I thought about the corporate events I’d attended as a consultant. The presenters who held rooms. None of them — not one — held rooms because of their technical prowess. They held rooms because of who they were when they spoke. Because of the force of their personality, the sincerity of their conviction, the warmth of their presence. The content mattered, but the content was never the thing that captivated. The person was the thing that captivated.
And then I thought about my magic performances. The content was good. The techniques were clean. The effects were solid. But the person — me — was barely present. I was a delivery mechanism for puzzles. The audience saw hands and cards and effects. They didn’t see a person they wanted to spend time with. They didn’t see someone who cared deeply about communicating something to them. They saw a demonstration.
Mary Ann Smith had no demonstrations. She had no tricks. She had nothing except herself — her voice, her conviction, her humanity, her fervent desire to communicate. And that was enough to captivate hundreds of sophisticated professionals and prompt a former president to acknowledge her power.
I had techniques, methods, hours of practice, a bag full of props, and a burning desire to not get caught. And I was being outperformed by every Mary Ann Smith in every room I entered.
Entertainment Is About Connection, Not Deception
The Mary Ann Smith story crystallizes a truth that I’d been circling for weeks but hadn’t been able to articulate: entertainment is fundamentally about connection, not deception.
The magician at the investment conference was focused on deception. Can I fool them? Can I baffle them? Can I create a puzzle they can’t solve? His orientation was toward the gap between what the audience knows and what he knows. The magic lived in that gap. And the audience, sensing that the magician’s primary interest was in maintaining the gap rather than connecting across it, disengaged.
Mary Ann Smith was focused on connection. She wanted to reach the people in front of her. She wanted them to understand something, feel something, take something away. Her orientation was toward the audience, not toward herself. She wasn’t trying to demonstrate her skills or maintain a knowledge gap. She was trying to communicate. To connect. To share.
The audience, sensing this, responded accordingly. They leaned in. They engaged. They gave her their full attention. Because she was offering them something they wanted — a genuine human connection with someone who cared about them — rather than something they didn’t particularly want, which was a series of puzzles to solve.
This distinction changed how I thought about everything I was doing. I’d been approaching performance as a demonstration of skill. I needed to approach it as an act of communication. Not “watch what I can do” but “let me share something with you.” Not “can you figure this out?” but “come with me on this journey.”
The shift sounds subtle. In practice, it’s seismic. It changes what you say, how you say it, where you look, what you care about, and what the audience experiences. It changes the fundamental orientation of the performance from inward (look at me) to outward (this is for you).
The Three Things She Had
Weber identifies three specific qualities that made Mary Ann Smith extraordinary as a speaker: voice, sincerity, and a fervent desire to communicate.
I want to unpack each of these because they’re not as obvious as they seem.
Voice doesn’t just mean she spoke loudly or clearly. It means she used her voice as an instrument. Variation in pitch, pace, volume, tone. She didn’t drone. She didn’t monotone. She used her voice the way a musician uses their instrument — with dynamics, with color, with intention. Every word was delivered with purpose, and the variation kept the audience alert because they never knew what was coming next.
I thought about my own performance voice and wanted to disappear. I had one gear: informational. “Pick a card. Look at it. Put it back.” Flat. Functional. No variation. No color. No dynamics. I sounded like I was reading instructions, because functionally, I was.
Sincerity means she meant it. Whatever she was talking about — SEC regulations, presumably, which is not inherently the most riveting subject matter — she believed in it. She cared. And the audience could feel that she cared. Sincerity is almost impossible to fake because humans are exquisitely tuned to detect it. We know, at a level below conscious thought, whether the person in front of us actually cares about what they’re saying. When they do, we lean in. When they don’t, we check out.
I thought about my own sincerity during performances and the assessment was mixed. Did I care about the techniques I was performing? Absolutely. Did the audience feel that I cared about them — about their experience, about connecting with them, about making this moment meaningful for them specifically? I don’t think they did. My care was directed inward, at my craft. Not outward, at the people in front of me.
A fervent desire to communicate means she wasn’t just willing to share — she was driven to share. She needed the audience to understand. This urgency is palpable. It’s the difference between a teacher who’s going through the motions and a teacher who genuinely cannot stand the idea that you might leave the room without understanding this concept. The urgent communicator creates energy. They pull the audience in because the audience can feel the pull.
My desire during performances was to execute cleanly. To not mess up. To maintain the methods. To demonstrate competence. Not to communicate. Not to share. Not to connect. The audience could feel the difference, even if they couldn’t articulate it. And they responded accordingly — with polite distance rather than rapt engagement.
What This Means for Magic
The Mary Ann Smith story doesn’t mean that techniques don’t matter. It means that techniques matter in the way that a vehicle matters to a journey — it’s necessary for the trip, but it’s not the destination. No one takes a road trip to experience the car. They take a road trip to experience the places the car takes them.
Magic technique is the car. The audience experience is the journey. And the most common mistake that technically skilled magicians make — the mistake I was making, the mistake the conference magician was making — is polishing the car obsessively while never thinking about where they’re driving.
Mary Ann Smith didn’t have a car. She had a bicycle. Metaphorically speaking, her technical toolkit was minimal — a voice and a message. But she knew exactly where she was going, and she wanted to take the audience there with an urgency that was irresistible.
I had a sports car — two years of technique, honed to high precision — and I was driving in circles in the parking lot. Technically impressive, maybe, to someone watching from the sidewalk. But pointless as a journey. Going nowhere. Taking the audience nowhere.
The fix wasn’t to abandon the techniques. The fix was to put them in service of something larger. To use the car to take the audience somewhere worth going. To find the story, the connection, the emotional journey that would give the techniques purpose beyond their own cleverness.
The Uncomfortable Question
The story forced me to sit with an uncomfortable question: If Mary Ann Smith walked into one of my performances, who would the audience rather watch?
Honestly? Her. Without hesitation. Because she would offer them something I wasn’t offering: the experience of being in the presence of someone who genuinely cared about reaching them. Someone whose primary goal was their experience, not her own execution. Someone who was performing for them rather than in front of them.
That distinction — performing for versus performing in front of — became a dividing line in my thinking. Everything I’d been doing was performing in front of people. Standing there, doing my thing, while they happened to be present. Mary Ann Smith performed for people. Everything she did was oriented toward them. Their understanding. Their engagement. Their experience.
The preposition matters. “For” implies service. “In front of” implies separation. And the audience can feel the difference in their bones.
What Changed After
I didn’t transform overnight. You don’t read a story and become a different performer the next day. But something shifted in my priorities. The next time I sat down to prepare for a performance, I didn’t start with the techniques. I started with the question: What do I want the audience to feel?
Not: what effect do I want to perform? Not: what technique do I want to showcase? But: what emotional experience do I want to create for the people who will be watching me?
This question, which I’d never asked before, reoriented everything. It changed what effects I selected. It changed how I scripted the patter. It changed what I practiced — suddenly, the words and the delivery mattered as much as the sleight of hand. It changed what I measured after a performance — not “did they catch the method?” but “were they moved?”
I started thinking about sincerity. About what I actually cared about in my magic, and how to communicate that care to the audience. About letting them see me as a person, not just as a pair of hands. About using my voice as an instrument rather than a conveyor belt for instructions.
I started thinking about desire to communicate. About what I was trying to share with the audience beyond “I can do something you can’t explain.” About the sense of wonder that drew me to magic in the first place, and whether I was sharing that wonder or just demonstrating that I possessed it.
None of this was easy. It’s still not easy. I’m still working on it. But the direction changed, fundamentally and permanently, because of a story about a frumpy government regulator who had no tricks and captivated every person in the room.
The Line I Carry
Weber draws a sharp line from the Mary Ann Smith story, and it’s the line I carry with me to every performance:
“Performance trumps trick every time.”
Not sometimes. Not usually. Every time.
The magician at the investment conference had tricks. Mary Ann Smith had performance. The audience chose performance. Not because they didn’t care about magic — they might have loved magic, under the right circumstances. But because performance speaks to something more fundamental in the human experience. We are drawn to people who connect with us. We are captivated by people who care about us. We remember people who made us feel something.
Tricks, without performance, are puzzles. Puzzles are interesting. Performance, even without tricks, is connection. Connection is what humans live for.
I still perform tricks. I still practice techniques. I still chase clean execution. But I do it in service of something I never thought about before a government regulator I’ve never met and never will meet taught me, through the pages of a book, that the person is always more important than the props.
Mary Ann Smith didn’t know she was teaching magicians. She was just doing what she did — communicating with sincerity and force and care. But she taught this one, and the lesson hasn’t faded.