There’s a basketball coach named Bobby Knight who said something that Ken Weber cites in Maximum Entertainment, and it landed on me like a dropped piano.
“Play against your own potential. Not your competition.”
Eight words. And like the best insights, the moment I read them, I knew they were going to rearrange how I thought about nearly everything.
The Comparison Trap
Let me confess something. For most of my magic journey, I compared myself to other performers. Not always consciously. Not always in a structured way. But the benchmarking was constant and automatic.
I’d watch another magician at an event and measure myself against them. Better technique than me? Worse? Better stage presence? Weaker audience management? I kept a running mental scoreboard — not because I’m unusually competitive, but because comparison is how humans naturally orient themselves. We don’t evaluate ourselves in a vacuum. We evaluate ourselves relative to the people around us.
And the problem with comparison is that it works both directions, and both directions are harmful.
When I compared myself to performers who were clearly better — more experienced, more polished, more commanding — the result was discouragement. A feeling of being irredeemably behind. Of having started too late, having too little natural talent, being too far from the level I needed to reach. Comparison with superior performers produced a kind of paralysis: why bother improving if the gap is so large?
When I compared myself to performers who were clearly worse — less prepared, less technically sound, less engaging — the result was complacency. A false sense of adequacy. A quiet voice saying: you’re not that bad. At least you’re better than that guy. The standard I was measuring against was low enough that meeting it felt like success. Comparison with inferior performers produced a kind of permission: permission to coast.
Neither direction served me. Discouragement and complacency look like opposite problems, but they produce the same result: stalled growth. One stops you from trying. The other stops you from pushing.
Bobby Knight’s line cuts through both.
The Consulting Mirror
In my consulting career, I’ve seen this dynamic play out at the organizational level more times than I can count.
Companies benchmark. It’s one of the fundamental activities of strategy. You look at what your competitors are doing, compare their performance to yours, and use the gaps to identify opportunities. Benchmarking is standard practice, taught in every MBA program, built into every strategic planning process.
But the best organizations I’ve worked with don’t benchmark against competitors. They benchmark against their own potential.
I worked with a manufacturing company in central Europe that was the clear market leader in their segment. By every competitive measure, they were winning. Higher market share, better margins, stronger brand. And they were rotting from the inside, because the competitive benchmark told them they were doing great.
The CEO, to his credit, recognized the problem. He stopped asking “How are we doing compared to competitors?” and started asking “How are we doing compared to what we’re capable of?” And the answer was very different. They were operating at maybe sixty percent of their potential. Their processes had slack. Their innovation pipeline had stalled. Their talent development was running on autopilot. By competitive standards, they were excellent. By the standard of their own capacity, they were leaving enormous value on the table.
That sixty percent number haunts me, because I think it applies to most of us in most of what we do. We’re operating at sixty percent of our potential and feeling fine about it, because the comparison set tells us sixty percent is above average.
My Own Sixty Percent
Let me be specific about what sixty percent looks like in my performing life.
At sixty percent, my shows are good. The techniques are clean. The audience responds positively. The effects land. I get the reactions I’m looking for, more or less. The client is satisfied. Nobody complains. Measured against the “is this acceptable?” standard, sixty percent is a passing grade.
At sixty percent, I’m coasting on established material. The routines are rehearsed but not refined. The transitions work but aren’t elegant. The patter is functional but not polished. I’m executing the show rather than inhabiting it. Going through the motions at a high enough level that nobody notices.
At sixty percent, I’m not making mistakes. I’m making choices that are safe rather than bold. I know which pieces in my set get the strongest reactions and which are merely adequate, and I’m letting the adequate pieces stay because they work well enough. I know which moments in my routines could be tighter, more compelling, more surprising — and I’m not doing the work to make them so.
This is what playing against your competition looks like. As long as the competition is other performers at events like mine, sixty percent is comfortable. It’s above the line. It earns the booking. It produces the check.
Playing against your own potential is a completely different standard. It asks: forget what other performers are doing. Forget whether the audience applauded. Forget whether the client rebooked. How close are you to the best version of this show that you’re capable of delivering?
And the honest answer, almost always, is: not close enough.
The Brutality of Self-Benchmarking
Bobby Knight’s principle is elegant but merciless. Because when you play against your competition, you can find a competitor who makes you look good. When you play against your own potential, you’re compared to an opponent who knows every shortcut you’ve taken, every rehearsal you’ve skipped, every moment where you chose comfort over growth.
Your potential knows that you haven’t updated your opening in six months, even though you know it could be stronger. Your potential knows that you dropped that one piece from your set because it was challenging to perform, not because it wasn’t effective. Your potential knows that you stopped seeking feedback because the last round of honest criticism was uncomfortable.
There’s nowhere to hide from your own potential. It’s the most demanding benchmark imaginable because it’s the one opponent who has complete information about your capabilities, your resources, and the gap between what you’re doing and what you could be doing.
In my consulting practice, I sometimes use a simple exercise with leadership teams. I ask them to rate their organization’s performance on a scale of one to ten, where ten represents the absolute best they believe the organization is capable of. Not the best in their industry. Not the best compared to competitors. The best they could be with the resources, talent, and knowledge they currently possess.
The average answer is usually around six or seven. Sometimes lower. And the conversation that follows is always the same: “If we all agree we’re operating at sixty-five percent of our potential, what’s preventing the other thirty-five percent?” The answers are never about resources or capability. They’re about discipline, focus, willingness to do the hard work, and tolerance for discomfort.
I ran this exercise on myself, sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, applying it to my performing. The number I arrived at was around five. Maybe five and a half. Not because I lack technique or material, but because the gap between what I do and what I’m capable of doing is enormous when I’m honest about it.
What Fills the Gap
The gap between current performance and potential is filled with a very specific substance: the work you’re avoiding.
Not the work you can’t do. The work you won’t do. The rehearsal that feels tedious. The feedback that feels uncomfortable. The changes to established material that feel risky. The practice session focused on your weakest area rather than your strongest. The honest self-evaluation that reveals how far you have to go.
Everyone operates below their potential because closing the gap requires consistently choosing the harder path. And our natural tendencies all point toward the easier one. We practice what we’re already good at. We perform the material we’re already comfortable with. We avoid the feedback that would show us where we’re falling short. We tell ourselves the comfortable story: this is working well enough.
Playing against your own potential means dismantling that story every single day. Not once. Not as a one-time insight. As a daily discipline of refusing to accept “good enough” from yourself even when everyone around you is telling you it’s more than good enough.
The 60% Success Trap
There’s a specific version of this that haunts performing: the positive audience response that masks mediocrity.
When I perform at sixty percent of my potential, the audience still responds well. They applaud. They express amazement. They tell me it was great. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive. And every bit of that positive feedback reinforces the sixty percent. It tells me I’m doing enough. It tells me the work I’m putting in is sufficient. It tells me the show is working.
But positive feedback from a polite audience is not the same as performing at your potential. Audiences are generous. They want to have a good time. They’ll applaud for competent work. They’ll tell you it was great even when it was merely good. The social dynamics of live performance almost guarantee positive feedback for anyone who clears the competence threshold.
This creates a trap. Positive responses make you feel successful. Feeling successful makes you stop pushing. Stopping pushing keeps you at sixty percent. And sixty percent keeps producing positive responses. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of comfortable mediocrity, lubricated by applause.
Breaking out of this cycle requires something psychologically very difficult: the willingness to be dissatisfied with outcomes that everyone around you is celebrating. The ability to receive applause and still think: I can do better. That wasn’t my best. That moment in the second routine was flat. That transition was awkward. That reaction was good, but it could have been incredible.
This sounds ungrateful. It isn’t. It’s the most respectful thing you can do for your audience — to keep raising the bar even when they’re not asking you to. To refuse to give them sixty percent when they deserve a hundred.
The Daily Practice
I’ve developed a small habit that helps me operationalize this principle. After every performance, before I pack up, I sit down and write one sentence answering a single question: what would the hundred-percent version of that show have looked like?
Not what went wrong. Not what I should fix. Just: what would it look like if I’d been at my absolute best tonight? What would the opening have felt like? How would the pacing have flowed? What reactions would I have seen? How would the climax have landed?
That vision — the hundred-percent version — becomes the benchmark for the next performance. Not “better than last time.” Not “better than the other guy.” The best I’m capable of. My own potential. The opponent who knows everything about me and will never let me get away with less than my best.
Bobby Knight was talking about basketball. But the principle is universal. When you play against your competition, you calibrate to external standards that may be lower than what you’re capable of. When you play against your own potential, you calibrate to the only standard that can’t be gamed, faked, or rationalized away.
It’s a harder way to live. It’s a harder way to perform. And it’s the only way to close the gap between who you are and who you could be.
Five and a half. That’s my current number. I intend to raise it.