There is a sentence in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that I’ve returned to more than any other in my study of performance craft. It’s not the most philosophical line in the book. It’s not the most complex. But it might be the most important:
“Strive to do a few things extraordinarily well. Most magicians do an extraordinary number of things, poorly.”
When I first read that, I had a physical reaction. A tightening in my chest. Because I knew — with the kind of knowing that you feel in your body before your mind catches up — that he was describing me.
At that point in my journey, roughly two years in, I could do a lot of things. I had a repertoire that spanned probably forty different effects. Card magic, coin work, mentalism pieces, a few prop-based routines I’d picked up along the way. If you’d asked me what I perform, I’d have rattled off a list that would have sounded impressive in its breadth.
But if you’d watched me perform any one of those forty things, you’d have seen something less impressive. Competent, maybe. Adequate, certainly. But extraordinary? Not one of them. Not a single effect in my repertoire had been worked to the level where it would stop someone in their tracks. I had breadth without depth. Quantity without mastery. A mile wide and an inch deep.
Weber’s line forced me to confront what I’d been avoiding: the uncomfortable truth that accumulation is not the same as achievement.
The Consultant’s Disease
In consulting, we have a version of this problem, and it’s one of the first things I learned to watch for in organizations. It’s called strategic diffusion — when a company tries to be excellent at everything simultaneously and ends up being mediocre at all of it. The startup that wants to be the best product, the best service, the cheapest option, and the most innovative brand, all at once. The result is always the same: resources get spread too thin, nothing reaches escape velocity, and the company gets outcompeted by focused rivals who do one thing extraordinarily well.
I’d diagnosed this problem in dozens of companies. I’d drawn the slides. I’d made the presentations. “You need to focus. Pick two or three things and be the best at those. Stop trying to do everything.” And then I’d gone home, sat in my hotel room, and done the exact opposite with my magic.
The parallel was almost comical once I saw it. Every new technique I learned, every new effect I added to the repertoire, was the equivalent of a company launching another product line. Each one consumed practice time, mental bandwidth, and performance slots. Each one was slightly below the standard I was capable of reaching if I’d focused. And collectively, they were dragging down the quality of everything I did.
The worst part? I felt productive while it was happening. Learning something new feels like progress. Adding a new effect to your repertoire feels like growth. The dopamine hit of “I can do something I couldn’t do yesterday” is real and addictive. But it masks a deeper stagnation — the stagnation that comes from never taking anything to the level of genuine mastery.
What “Extraordinarily Well” Actually Means
Let me be specific about what I mean by extraordinarily well, because the phrase can sound abstract.
An effect performed extraordinarily well is one where every element has been refined to the point of invisibility. The technique is so clean that it doesn’t register as technique. The script is so natural that it sounds like spontaneous conversation. The timing is so precise that the audience experiences the effect exactly as intended, every single time. The transitions in and out of the effect are seamless. The performer’s attention is entirely on the audience, not on the mechanics.
Now compare that to an effect performed adequately. The technique is functional but visible to an attentive eye. The script is memorized but sounds memorized. The timing is roughly correct but varies from performance to performance. The transitions are handled but not elegant. The performer’s attention is split between the audience and the mechanics.
Both performances “work” in the sense that the effect happens. But the experience they create is fundamentally different. The first creates wonder. The second creates mild interest. And the gap between mild interest and wonder is the gap between a forgettable performance and one that follows someone home.
When I honestly evaluated my repertoire against the “extraordinarily well” standard, the number of effects that qualified was exactly zero. Forty effects, zero at the level Weber was describing. That was a hard number to face.
The Decision to Cut
The hardest part of applying Weber’s principle wasn’t understanding it. The understanding was instant. The hard part was doing it — actually reducing my repertoire to a handful of effects and committing to working those few things to a level I’d never achieved.
I started by asking myself a question I’d asked countless consulting clients: if you could only keep three, which three would you keep? In consulting, this question forces clarity. It cuts through the noise of “but we need all of them” and reveals what actually matters.
My three were revealing. I chose the effects that I loved performing the most, that generated the strongest audience reactions, and that I felt had the most room for improvement. Not the most impressive on paper. Not the most technically difficult. The ones where I felt the gap between where I was and where I could be was the largest and most exciting.
Then I did something that felt physically uncomfortable: I stopped practicing everything else.
Not forever. Not as a permanent retirement of those effects. But for a defined period — I gave myself three months — I would practice only those three effects and nothing else. Every hotel-room session, every spare twenty minutes, every bit of practice energy would go into three effects instead of forty.
The results were not instant. The first few weeks felt unproductive because I was already competent at these effects, and the improvements were subtle. I wasn’t learning new things; I was refining existing things. The dopamine hit of novelty was absent. It felt like polishing something that was already clean.
But around week four, something shifted. I started noticing details I’d never noticed before. The way a particular phrase landed differently depending on how I timed the breath before it. The way a single hand position change made a moment read as casual instead of deliberate. The way a tiny pause before a reveal could double the audience’s reaction. These were refinements that would have been invisible to me if I’d been splitting my attention across forty effects. They only became visible because I was looking at the same three things with the intensity that concentration brings.
By month two, the three effects were better than anything I’d ever performed. By month three, they were in a different category entirely. The same effects, the same basic structure, but executed at a level of polish that made them feel new. People who’d seen me perform before commented that something had changed. They couldn’t identify what, exactly, but the experience was different. More confident. More engaging. More… something.
That something was depth. For the first time, I was performing effects that had been worked past competence, past proficiency, into something approaching mastery. And the difference was not subtle.
Why Depth Beats Breadth
The math of depth versus breadth is unintuitive until you work it out.
Say you have twenty hours of practice time per week. If you spread that across forty effects, each effect gets thirty minutes per week. In three months, each effect has received roughly six and a half hours of focused work. That’s enough to maintain competence. It’s not enough to achieve anything remarkable.
Now take those same twenty hours and apply them to three effects. Each effect gets nearly seven hours per week. In three months, each effect has received roughly ninety hours of focused work. That’s not just maintenance — that’s deep, transformative practice. That’s the kind of sustained focus where real breakthroughs happen.
The difference isn’t linear. Ninety hours on a single effect doesn’t produce fourteen times the improvement of six and a half hours. It produces qualitatively different results. The things you discover at hour sixty are things that simply don’t exist at hour six. The refinements you make at hour eighty are refinements you couldn’t even perceive at hour twenty. Depth doesn’t just improve the effect — it reveals dimensions of the effect you didn’t know existed.
This is what Weber understood. Doing a few things extraordinarily well isn’t just better than doing many things adequately. It’s a fundamentally different kind of activity. It produces a fundamentally different kind of result.
The Professional Consequence
Here’s the part that surprised me: reducing my repertoire to three effects didn’t limit my performing opportunities. It expanded them.
When I had forty effects, I’d show up to a corporate event and agonize over which ones to include in the set. I’d try to pack in variety, which meant each effect got rushed. The set felt like a sampler plate — a little bit of everything, not enough of anything.
With three deeply worked effects, the set became focused and powerful. Each effect had room to breathe. I could slow down, take my time, let moments land. The audience wasn’t getting a survey course in magic — they were getting three experiences that had been crafted with care and performed with confidence.
And that confidence was real, not performed. When you know your material at the depth that ninety hours of focused work produces, there’s a calm that settles over the performance. You’re not worried about what comes next. You’re not managing technical anxiety. You’re free to be present with the audience, to read the room, to adjust in real time. That freedom is the dividend of depth, and it’s worth more than any amount of breadth.
Adam Wilber told me something once that I think about often in this context. He said that the performers who work the hardest on the fewest effects are the ones who seem the most effortless on stage. And the performers who spread themselves across the most material are the ones who seem the most stressed. It’s a perfect inversion of what you’d expect — the person with the least material appears to have the most ease.
But it makes sense. Ease comes from mastery. Mastery comes from depth. Depth requires focus. Focus requires saying no to most things so you can say yes, fully, to a few things.
The Ongoing Discipline
I won’t pretend that I’ve perfectly internalized this principle. The temptation to expand — to learn the new thing, to add the shiny effect, to grow the repertoire — is constant. Every time I see a great performer do something I haven’t tried, the acquisition impulse fires. Every time I browse new material, the part of my brain that equates novelty with progress starts buzzing.
But now I have Weber’s line as a counterweight. A few things, extraordinarily well. Not many things, adequately. The discipline is not in the doing. The discipline is in the not-doing. In the willingness to leave effects on the shelf so that the effects you do perform can reach the level they deserve.
In consulting, we’d call this strategic focus. In magic, Weber would call it the first pillar of entertainment success: master your craft. Not broadly. Deeply. Not many things. A few things. Extraordinarily well.
The extraordinary number of things performed poorly is easy. Anyone can do that. The few things performed extraordinarily well — that’s the work of a lifetime. And it’s the only work that produces something worth watching.