I want to tell you about the best show I ever had. And then I want to tell you what it almost cost me.
It was a corporate event in Linz. About eighty people, post-dinner, good energy in the room. Everything clicked. The opening landed perfectly. The audience leaned in from the first moment and never leaned back. The humor worked. The moments of astonishment were genuine. The climax — without getting into the specifics of what I did — produced the kind of reaction that performers dream about. Audible gasps. Spontaneous applause mid-routine. People turning to each other with wide eyes.
When it was over, the reaction was overwhelming. People crowded around. The client was ecstatic. Multiple guests told me it was the best entertainment they’d seen at any corporate event, ever. I drove back to my hotel that night feeling like I’d cracked the code. Like everything I’d been working toward had finally come together.
And for the next three months, I barely improved.
Not because I stopped working. I still practiced. I still performed. But something had shifted. That Linz show had given me a benchmark — a high-water mark — and instead of pushing past it, I found myself trying to replicate it. I froze my material in place. I stopped questioning my choices. I stopped looking for weaknesses. Why would I? The show was working. The audience had told me so.
This is the danger of success. And it’s far more insidious than the danger of failure, because failure at least forces you to change.
The Cocoon of Positive Feedback
There’s a phenomenon in consulting that I’ve seen destroy companies: the cocoon of success.
Here’s how it works. A company achieves strong results. Revenue grows. Market share increases. The leadership team receives positive feedback from every direction — the board, investors, customers, employees. Everything confirms that the strategy is working. Everything says: keep doing what you’re doing.
And so they do. They keep doing what they’re doing. They stop questioning. They stop adapting. They stop looking for weak spots. The positive feedback creates a protective cocoon that insulates them from the signals that something is changing — that the market is shifting, that competitors are innovating, that what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.
By the time the cocoon breaks, it’s often too late. The company that was thriving two years ago is suddenly scrambling, because it spent those two years bathing in its own success rather than preparing for what came next.
I’ve sat across from CEOs who genuinely could not understand how things went wrong. “We were doing everything right,” they’d say. And they were — by the standards of the previous period. But the world moved, and they didn’t move with it, because success had told them they didn’t need to.
That Linz show was my cocoon. The applause wrapped around me and made me warm and comfortable and, above all, complacent.
Why Applause Lies
Let me be clear about something: audiences are not lying when they applaud. They genuinely enjoyed the show. The response is authentic. The standing ovation is real.
But applause is a terrible feedback mechanism for growth, for three specific reasons.
First, applause is binary. It tells you “good” or “not good.” It doesn’t tell you “good, but the pacing in the second routine was off.” It doesn’t tell you “good, but you lost them for thirty seconds during the transition.” It doesn’t tell you “good, but the moment where you thought you killed was actually the second-strongest reaction, and the strongest was a moment you didn’t even notice.” Applause is a pass/fail grade. And once you’re passing, it tells you nothing about how to get better.
Second, applause is socially driven. People clap because other people are clapping. They give standing ovations partly because the first row stood up and it felt awkward to remain seated. The social dynamics of a live audience inflate positive responses and suppress negative ones. You will never, in the history of performing, have an audience member raise their hand and say “That third effect was weaker than the others and your transition into the finale was clunky.” They’ll clap and tell you it was wonderful. Because that’s what you do after a show.
Third, and most dangerous: applause reinforces the status quo. When you get a great response, the immediate psychological effect is validation. What I did worked. The material is right. The pacing is right. The delivery is right. Every element that contributed to tonight’s success gets locked in, because changing something that works feels irrational.
But “works” is not the same as “optimal.” A routine can work — can reliably produce applause — while still being at sixty percent of its potential. And the applause will never tell you that. It will tell you “good enough.” Every single night.
The Weber Warning
Weber puts it bluntly: never settle for “good enough.” The phrase “good is never enough” runs through Maximum Entertainment like a drumbeat, and when I first read it, I thought it was motivational platitude. The kind of thing that sounds inspiring on a poster but doesn’t mean anything concrete.
After Linz, I understood what he meant. He wasn’t being motivational. He was describing a trap. The trap is that once you reach “good,” the pressure to improve vanishes. The external feedback says you’ve arrived. The audience is happy. The client rebooks. The checks clear. Every signal from the outside world tells you the destination has been reached.
And so you stop traveling. You settle into “good.” You build your house there. And you live in it for years, never knowing that the town you settled in is miles from where you could have been.
The performers Weber admires most — the ones he holds up as models throughout his book — are the ones who never settled. Who treated every positive response as evidence that they had a platform to push from, not a destination to rest at. Who were, by any external measure, already extraordinary, and who continued to refine, question, edit, and improve as if they were beginners.
That mindset is brutally difficult to maintain when the world keeps telling you you’re good enough. It requires a kind of deliberate dissatisfaction — not unhappiness, not self-flagellation, but a persistent refusal to accept any version of yourself as the final version.
The Three-Month Flatline
Let me tell you what those three months after Linz actually looked like from the inside.
On the surface, everything was fine. I was performing regularly. The shows were good. The audiences responded well. My booking calendar was healthy. By any reasonable measure, things were going well.
But underneath, something had calcified. My material was the same. Exactly the same. Not a word changed in my patter. Not a beat adjusted in my timing. Not a single routine questioned or reconsidered. I was performing the Linz show on repeat, trying to recreate that specific magic, and the shows were getting… fine.
Not bad. Not great. Fine. The energy was slightly lower each time. The reactions were slightly more muted. Not dramatically — I doubt anyone in the audience noticed the decline. But I noticed. The show that had felt electric in Linz was becoming routine. The moments that had been spontaneous were becoming mechanical. The material that had felt alive was becoming rehearsed in the worst sense of the word.
This is what calcification looks like. The show that was once your best work becomes your standard work becomes your autopilot. And autopilot is the death of performing, because autopilot means you’ve stopped being present. You’ve stopped responding to the audience. You’ve stopped finding new things in your own material. You’re executing rather than performing, and the audience — even if they can’t articulate it — can feel the difference.
Breaking Out of the Cocoon
What broke me out of it was, appropriately enough, a bad show.
It was a smaller event, a private dinner in Salzburg. About thirty people, intimate setting, and for reasons I couldn’t pin down at the time, the show fell flat. Not a disaster. Just flat. The reactions were polite rather than enthusiastic. The laughter was thin. The moments that usually worked felt forced.
And because the show didn’t go well, I was forced to do what success had been preventing: look honestly at my material and ask what wasn’t working.
The answer was painful. The material wasn’t bad. It was stale. I’d been performing it on autopilot for three months, and the staleness had crept in like dry rot. The words were right but the delivery had lost its freshness. The timing was precise but mechanical rather than organic. The whole show had the feel of something being recited rather than something being lived.
The Salzburg show was a gift, disguised as a failure. It broke the cocoon. It forced me to start questioning again, editing again, rehearsing with intention again. Within two weeks, I’d made changes to every routine in my set — some small, some significant. And the very act of changing things reignited the creative engagement that success had suppressed.
The Discipline of Dissatisfaction
Here’s what I’ve learned from this experience, and from watching this dynamic play out in both my performing life and my consulting work: success requires a specific, counterintuitive discipline. The discipline of dissatisfaction.
Not chronic dissatisfaction — that’s just misery. A targeted, productive dissatisfaction that coexists with genuine appreciation for what’s working. The ability to stand at the back of a room after a great show, feel the warmth of the audience’s response, and simultaneously think: where was the weakness? What could be tighter? What moment didn’t quite land the way it should have? What’s the next level?
Ralphie May, the stand-up comedian, had a brilliant practice for this. He’d record every show and review it afterward, looking not for what worked but for what could be better. Even shows that killed — shows where the audience was in tears laughing — he’d mine for improvements. Not because the shows were bad, but because he knew they could be better. And he treated that gap between good and better as the most important territory in his craft.
I’ve adopted a version of this. After every show, I write down three things: the best moment of the night, the weakest moment of the night, and one specific thing I’ll change for next time. The first item is easy and satisfying. The second requires honesty. The third requires commitment.
The key is the third item. Not just identifying the weakness, but committing to a specific change. Because identification without action is just intellectual exercise. It’s the change that breaks the cocoon. The change that prevents calcification. The change that ensures tonight’s show isn’t a template for tomorrow’s.
Success as Platform, Not Destination
The Linz show was important. Not because it was great — although it was — but because it taught me what happens when you treat greatness as an endpoint rather than a waypoint.
The best show you’ve ever done isn’t the standard to protect. It’s the floor to build from. The reactions you got last time aren’t the benchmark to replicate. They’re the minimum to exceed. Every success, properly understood, is evidence that you can go further — not evidence that you’ve gone far enough.
This is a hard way to think. It means never fully celebrating. It means being in a state of permanent creative restlessness. It means looking at your best work and thinking: not bad. Now make it better.
But the alternative is the cocoon. The flatline. The slow, invisible decline from excellent to good to adequate to stale, all while the audience keeps clapping and you keep thinking everything is fine.
Weber was right. Good is never enough. Not because good isn’t valuable — it is. But because the moment you accept “good” as your standard, you stop moving toward great. And the distance between good and great is where the most important work of your performing life happens.
The applause felt wonderful in Linz. It still does. But I’ve learned to listen past it now. To hear not just what the audience is telling me, but what they’re not telling me. To appreciate the applause and then, immediately, to start looking for the next thing to change.
The standing ovation is not the finish line. It’s the starting gun.