There is a moment in every performer’s journey — or at least there was one in mine — when the feeling changes. Not gradually. Not through a slow fade from nervous to confident. It shifts like a switch.
I remember the exact show. A corporate event in Graz, maybe eighteen months after I’d started performing with any regularity for Vulpine Creations. I was backstage in a converted conference room, running through my final mental rehearsal. And something was different. I noticed it because it was absent: the anxiety.
Not the butterflies. Those were there, as always — the anticipatory energy that I’ve learned to welcome rather than fear. The anxiety was different. The anxiety was the gnawing worry that something would go wrong and I wouldn’t know what to do. That the audience would throw me a curveball and I’d freeze. That a prop would malfunction, a transition would stumble, a routine would fall flat, and I’d be standing there exposed, with no plan and no recourse.
That specific anxiety was gone. Not suppressed. Not managed. Gone. And in its place was something I can only describe as a kind of quiet certainty. I knew what I was going to do. I knew what I would do if things went differently than planned. I knew my material so deeply that the script had become a landscape I could navigate from any direction. I could depart from it, explore, and find my way back without effort.
I walked out and performed the best set of my life up to that point. Not because I did anything new. Not because the material was stronger. Not because the audience was unusually receptive. Because I was fully available. My mind wasn’t partitioned between execution and worry. It was entirely, completely present.
That’s what invincibility feels like. And it comes from one place.
The Superman Problem
Ken Weber uses an analogy in Maximum Entertainment that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: the performer is Superman. Not in the grandiose sense — not claiming to have actual powers — but in the structural sense. Superman’s confidence doesn’t come from pretending. It comes from capability. He knows what he can do. He’s done it before. He’s tested himself against every scenario he can imagine, and he’s come through. His confidence is the natural expression of his preparation.
The performer who has obsessively prepared is in the same position. The confidence isn’t an act. It isn’t bravado. It isn’t the “fake it till you make it” advice that self-help books love to offer. It’s the real, grounded certainty that comes from having rehearsed so thoroughly that the performance contains no unknowns.
The key word is “unknowns.” You can’t eliminate surprises — the world is unpredictable, and live performance doubly so. But you can eliminate unknowns. A surprise is something unexpected that happens. An unknown is something unexpected that happens and you have no plan for. Surprises are manageable. Unknowns are terrifying.
Obsessive preparation converts unknowns into surprises. You’ve rehearsed the scenario where the prop doesn’t work. You’ve rehearsed the scenario where the audience is quiet. You’ve rehearsed the scenario where someone asks an unexpected question. You’ve rehearsed your recovery from every category of failure you can imagine. The specific surprise that actually occurs on any given night might not be one you rehearsed exactly, but it falls into a category you’ve prepared for. And that’s enough. That’s the difference between stumbling and adapting.
The Script as Safe House
Weber uses a metaphor that captures this perfectly: the script is your safe house. It’s the place you can always return to, no matter how far you’ve wandered.
This is critical because the best performances involve departure from the script. The moments that create real connection — responding to something an audience member says, riffing on something that happens in the room, adjusting your energy to match the specific crowd in front of you — these all require leaving the scripted path. And leaving the scripted path is only possible when you know the path so well that you can find your way back from anywhere.
Think of it like navigating a city you know intimately. If you know Vienna the way I know Vienna — every street, every alley, every shortcut — you can wander anywhere and never be lost. You can take a detour through a neighborhood you haven’t visited in months and still know exactly how to get back to where you need to be. The map is in your head. The freedom to explore comes from the certainty that you can always return.
Performers who don’t know their script that deeply are stuck on the main road. They can’t explore because they can’t afford to get lost. Every departure from the planned route risks them being unable to find their way back. So they stay on script, word for word, beat for beat, and the performance has the airless quality of something recited rather than lived.
The script has to be in your bones. Not memorized — that implies effort, the conscious retrieval of information. Internalized. So deep in your system that the words come without thought, the way your native language comes without thought. You don’t “remember” how to speak your mother tongue. You just speak it. That’s the level at which a performance script needs to live.
And getting it to that level requires what can only honestly be described as obsessive repetition.
Fitzkee’s Brutal Standard
Dariel Fitzkee, writing back in the 1940s, laid out a rehearsal standard that sounds almost punishing. Continue rehearsing until you can go through the entire act, time after time, without a single mistake. Then continue until you are “thoroughly sick of it.” Then continue more.
His reasoning is both practical and psychological. The practical argument: if you allow mistakes to remain during rehearsal, you are drilling those mistakes into your subconscious as part of the finished act. Every time you stumble through a transition in rehearsal and think “I’ll fix that later,” you’re actually training your body to stumble through that transition. The mistake isn’t a temporary error — it’s becoming embedded. It’s becoming habitual.
The psychological argument: when you’ve rehearsed to the point of being thoroughly sick of your material, your conscious mind has completely released its grip on the mechanics. The mechanics have been delegated entirely to the subconscious. And when the mechanics are subconscious, your entire conscious mind is free.
Free for what? For the only thing that matters during a performance: the audience. Free to watch them. Free to read their reactions. Free to adjust your pacing. Free to respond to what’s happening in the room. Free to be a human being connecting with other human beings, rather than an operator running a mental checklist.
This is the result that obsessive preparation delivers. Not perfection — perfection is an illusion. Availability. The capacity to be fully, completely present because nothing in the performance requires your conscious attention.
The Graz Threshold
Let me go back to that show in Graz, because I want to be specific about what was different in my preparation.
For that show, I had done something I’d never done before: I’d rehearsed not just the routines, but every possible deviation from the routines. I’d rehearsed the full set in my performance clothes. I’d rehearsed it at different energy levels — high, medium, low — to prepare for different audience states. I’d rehearsed the transitions between every routine in both directions, because I’d decided to make the set modular, with the ability to swap the order of two middle routines depending on how the audience was responding.
I’d rehearsed my recovery from the three most likely prop failures. I’d rehearsed what I’d say if an audience member asked to examine something at an inconvenient moment. I’d rehearsed the opening sequence in three variations — one for a warm audience, one for a reserved one, one for a distracted one.
I’d done all of this over four days in hotel rooms in Vienna and Graz, running through the full set at least three times each day, with the specific variations mixed in. By the time I walked backstage, I had performed the set — or some version of it — more than a dozen times in the preceding ninety-six hours.
The result wasn’t that the show went perfectly. A few things happened that I hadn’t rehearsed specifically — there was an issue with the lighting during my second routine, and a waiter dropped something during a quiet moment. But those were surprises, not unknowns. I adjusted without thought. The lighting issue meant I moved to a slightly different position. The waiter’s drop got acknowledged with a quick look and a half-smile that the audience responded to. Neither event cost me anything because my mind had the bandwidth to handle them.
That bandwidth is what preparation buys you. Not certainty about what will happen. Certainty about your ability to handle whatever happens.
The Illusion of Spontaneity
There’s a paradox at the heart of obsessive preparation that took me a long time to understand. The more you prepare, the more spontaneous you appear. The more you rehearse, the more natural you seem. The more thoroughly you script, the more conversational your delivery becomes.
This sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. Think about the best conversationalists you know — the people who are effortlessly witty, who always have the right response, who make social interaction look like an art form. Those people aren’t winging it. They’ve told those stories before. They’ve used those phrases before. They’ve refined their delivery through thousands of social interactions. Their “spontaneity” is the product of deep pattern recognition and extensive practice.
Performance works the same way. The performer who seems most natural, most comfortable, most in-the-moment is almost always the one who has rehearsed the most thoroughly. Because thoroughness eliminates the need for real-time decision-making, and the absence of real-time decision-making looks like ease. It looks like someone who’s just being themselves.
In my consulting career, the same principle applies. The best client presentations I’ve given — the ones that felt conversational, responsive, natural — were the ones I prepared most thoroughly for. I knew the material so well that I could respond to questions without breaking stride, adjust the narrative to match the room’s energy, and appear to be speaking extemporaneously while actually following a deeply internalized structure.
The worst presentations were the ones where I was underprepared and therefore visibly working — searching for words, organizing thoughts in real time, losing the thread when interrupted. That’s what insufficient preparation looks like. Not disaster. Effort. Visible, transparent effort where ease should be.
What Invincibility Actually Means
I want to be careful with the word “invincible,” because it sounds grandiose and I don’t mean it that way.
I don’t mean that you become immune to failure. Things still go wrong. Effects still misfire occasionally. Audiences still sometimes don’t respond the way you expect. External factors still intrude — bad rooms, bad sound, bad timing.
What changes is your relationship with those things. When you’re thoroughly prepared, a mishap is an event to be handled, not a crisis to be survived. Your nervous system doesn’t spike. Your mind doesn’t scramble. You address the situation from a place of calm competence because you’ve rehearsed this category of situation before and you know the response is already in your system.
That calm is what the audience experiences as invincibility. Not the absence of problems, but the visibly unshakeable response to problems. The performer who encounters an issue and handles it without missing a beat communicates something powerful: nothing can touch me. I’m in control. You’re in good hands.
That communication — that nonverbal broadcast of absolute control — is what Weber means by the Superman analogy. Superman doesn’t worry. Not because nothing bad can happen, but because he’s equipped to handle anything that does happen. The audience reads that equipment not as preparation but as power.
The Cost
I won’t pretend this comes cheap. Obsessive preparation takes time. It takes energy. It takes a willingness to spend hours doing unglamorous, repetitive work that nobody will see. It means running through your set for the thirteenth time when you’d rather be doing anything else. It means Fitzkee’s standard: continuing until you’re thoroughly sick of it, and then continuing some more.
It means rehearsing in your performance clothes when you’d rather be comfortable. It means scripting your transitions when you’d rather leave them to instinct. It means identifying every micro-action in your performance and rehearsing it individually when you’d rather focus on the big, exciting moments.
But the return on that investment is extraordinary. Not a marginally better show. A fundamentally different experience — for you and for the audience. The difference between a performer who is managing a performance and a performer who is living inside one.
That night in Graz, I understood for the first time what preparation is actually for. It’s not for the show. It’s for you. It’s the process by which you earn the right to stop thinking and start being. To stop executing and start connecting. To stop performing and start inhabiting.
Invincibility isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t confidence that some people have and others don’t. It’s the product of preparation so thorough that there’s nothing left to worry about. And when there’s nothing left to worry about, everything else becomes possible.