For the first couple of years of my performing life, I benchmarked myself against other magicians. Specifically, other magicians at my level — intermediate performers who were figuring things out, making mistakes, and gradually improving. And by that measure, I was doing fine. Better than some. Worse than others. Firmly in the middle of the pack.
Ken Weber blew up that entire frame of reference with a single metaphor.
The Hershey Bar problem. The idea is this: you’re not competing with other chocolate bars. You’re competing with every possible thing the customer could spend their money on instead. Every form of entertainment. Every use of their evening. Every alternative claim on their attention and their wallet.
The customer standing in the candy aisle isn’t choosing between Hershey’s and Cadbury’s. They’re choosing between chocolate, a bag of chips, a coffee, saving the dollar, or walking past the display entirely. The competitive set isn’t “other chocolate.” It’s “everything else.”
Applied to magic, this means something deeply uncomfortable: you’re not competing with other magicians. Your audience isn’t choosing between you and the other card guy who performs at corporate events. They’re choosing between your show and Netflix. Between your performance and a comedy club. Between hiring you and booking a DJ. Between sitting through your act and scrolling through their phone.
That realization hit me like a truck.
The Comfortable Illusion
Benchmarking against other magicians is comfortable because the standard is achievable. Most magicians — and I include myself here — are adequate. Competent. Capable of executing their material cleanly, engaging an audience reasonably well, and delivering a show that earns polite applause and perhaps a few genuine moments of astonishment.
Against that standard, being “good” feels attainable. You practice your techniques, you develop your material, you perform regularly, and you improve. You watch other magicians and notice things you do better. You notice things they do better, and you work on those things. The whole ecosystem is self-referential and self-reinforcing.
But the audience doesn’t live in that ecosystem. The audience lives in a world saturated with entertainment options. They’ve watched stand-up specials on Netflix that are written, edited, and polished by teams of professionals over months. They’ve been to concerts where every moment is choreographed, lit, and sound-designed to create maximum emotional impact. They’ve binged television shows with writing so tight that every scene serves the story and every word earns its place.
That’s the standard. Not “better than the other magician.” Better than everything else the audience has experienced. Or at least competitive with it. At least in the same league.
When I first grasped this, the gap between where I was and where I needed to be felt enormous. It was like I’d been training for a local fun run and someone told me I was actually registered for an Olympic qualifier.
The Corporate Event Reality
Nowhere is this more obvious than at corporate events, which are the context where I perform most often.
Think about what’s happening at a corporate event. A company has gathered its people — usually at significant expense — for some combination of business content and social bonding. The evening portion might include dinner, drinks, entertainment. The entertainment budget is real money. The client has chosen to spend it on a performer rather than on a DJ, a band, a comedian, a photo booth, or any of a dozen other options.
Every one of those alternatives is a Hershey Bar on the shelf. The client picked you instead. And the implicit promise of that booking is that you’ll deliver an experience that justifies the choice. Not “better than no entertainment.” Better than the alternatives. Better than the band they could have hired. Better than the comedian who was also available. Better than letting people just mingle and talk, which — let’s be honest — is often what people at corporate events would prefer to do anyway.
I remember a specific event in Salzburg where I’d been booked for a post-dinner performance. The room was full of sales executives who’d been in sessions since eight in the morning. They were tired. They’d already had a few drinks. The energy in the room was that particular corporate-evening blend of obligation and impatience.
And I was the entertainment. The thing standing between them and either genuine enjoyment or a quiet escape to their hotel rooms. If I wasn’t at least as engaging as whatever they’d be watching on their laptops upstairs, I was going to lose them. Not to another magician. To their own preference for something else.
I held them that night. But it was closer than I wanted it to be. And afterward, sitting alone in my hotel room replaying the evening, I knew that “close” wasn’t good enough. Not against the standard the Hershey Bar problem demands.
What “Good Enough” Actually Means
Here’s the thing about being “good enough”: it’s a moving target, and it always moves up.
Twenty years ago, being a competent magician at a corporate event was enough. The bar was lower. People’s entertainment expectations were calibrated to a world with fewer options. A solid card routine and some good patter went a long way.
Today, those same people watch Penn and Teller expose and celebrate magic on television. They’ve seen Derren Brown’s psychological illusions. They’ve scrolled past a hundred magic clips on social media, each one algorithmically selected to be the most astonishing thing they’ve seen that day. Their frame of reference for what magic can be has been shaped by the best performers in the world, presented through the most flattering medium possible.
You’re not competing with other live magicians. You’re competing with the audience’s memory of the best magic they’ve ever seen, filtered through the production values of professional television and the compression algorithms of social media.
Good enough, in this context, is not good enough. Not even close.
This is what Weber means by raising your level. Not raising it relative to where you were last month. Raising it relative to where the audience’s expectations have gone. And those expectations have been inflated by an entertainment industry that spends billions of dollars creating experiences specifically designed to command attention and produce emotional responses.
Your forty-five minutes at the corporate dinner needs to compete with that. Maybe not dollar-for-dollar in production value, but moment-for-moment in engagement. In the quality of the experience. In the audience’s feeling that this was time genuinely well spent.
The Consulting Lesson I Should Have Applied Sooner
In my consulting world, we talk about this all the time. It’s called competitive differentiation, and the key insight is that your real competitive set is usually much wider than you think.
I once worked with a hotel chain that was obsessing over their competition with other hotel chains. Their analysis was entirely focused on room rates, amenities, and loyalty programs relative to their direct competitors. But the real competitive threat wasn’t other hotels. It was Airbnb. And co-working spaces that were eating into business travel. And video conferencing that was eliminating the need to travel at all. The competitive set wasn’t “other hotels.” It was “everything the customer could do instead of staying in a hotel.”
When you expand the competitive frame, everything changes. The questions become bigger. The standards become higher. The things you thought were differentiating advantages turn out to be baseline expectations that everyone in the wider competitive set already meets.
This is exactly the Hershey Bar problem applied to magic. When your competitive frame is “other magicians,” a clean card routine is a differentiator. When your competitive frame is “all entertainment,” a clean card routine is table stakes. It’s the bare minimum. The thing you need just to be in the conversation.
So What Differentiates?
If technical competence is table stakes — the minimum requirement for entry, not the thing that wins — then what actually differentiates? What puts you on the shelf next to Netflix and comedy specials and doesn’t embarrass you?
The answer, which I came to gradually and reluctantly, is the total quality of the experience.
Not the tricks. Not the methods. Not the technical execution. The complete, moment-by-moment experience of being in the room with you. The personality you project. The stories you tell. The connection you create with the people in front of you. The pacing — the way you build tension and release it, the way you manage energy, the way you give the audience time to react and then sweep them into the next moment. The structure of the show from opening to climax.
Think about a great stand-up comedian. What makes them great isn’t the jokes. Any decent comedy writer can produce good jokes. What makes them great is the total performance — the timing, the persona, the way they make the audience feel like they’re having a conversation, the escalation from small laughs to big laughs to the payoff that brings down the house. The jokes are the vehicle. The experience is the product.
Magic works the same way. The effects are the vehicle. The experience is the product. And the quality of that experience is determined by everything that happens between the effects as much as by the effects themselves.
This is why Weber’s Six Pillars framework matters so much. It’s not about technique. Technique is Pillar One — important, yes, but just the foundation. The other five pillars — communicating your humanity, capturing the excitement, controlling every moment, eliminating weak spots, building to a climax — are all about the quality of the experience. They’re about the things that differentiate a magical evening from a competent demonstration.
The Standard I Set for Myself
After internalizing the Hershey Bar problem, I set a new standard. Not “better than last time,” although that’s important. Not “better than other magicians at my level,” although that’s natural. The new standard was: would this person, having experienced my show, tell someone else about it? Not out of politeness. Not because they were asked. Spontaneously. Because the experience was so memorable that they wanted to share it.
That’s the bar. Not applause — applause is social obligation. Not “that was great” — that’s conversational politeness. The bar is: was this experience remarkable enough that someone would voluntarily tell a friend about it?
When I think about the entertainment that I voluntarily talk about — the shows I recommend, the performances I describe to friends, the experiences I bring up unprompted — they all share a common quality. They weren’t just good. They were distinctive. They made me feel something specific and memorable. They gave me a story to tell.
That’s what being on the shelf next to Netflix requires. Not just competence. Not just a pleasant evening. Something worth talking about.
I’m not there yet. Not consistently. Not every time. But I know what the target looks like now, and knowing the target is the first step toward hitting it. The Hershey Bar problem didn’t discourage me. It clarified what “good” actually means. And “good,” it turns out, is a much higher bar than I’d been setting for myself.
Good is never enough. That’s not a criticism. It’s a compass heading.