There was a period — probably six months, maybe longer — when I performed almost entirely without speaking. Not in a deliberate, artistic, “silent act” kind of way. In a “I haven’t figured out what to say yet” kind of way. I had routines I could execute cleanly, transitions I’d rehearsed, a set structure that moved from opening to close without dead air. But between the magical moments, there was… nothing. Or close to nothing. Functional instructions (“Pick a card, any card”), brief setup lines, and occasional comments that existed only to fill space while I did something with my hands.
The effects worked. The audience reacted to the moments of impossibility. But between those moments, I could feel the attention dissipate. The audience was waiting for the next trick, not engaged in a continuous experience. I was a vending machine. Insert attention, receive amazement, wait for the next cycle.
I was an animated prop.
The Animated Prop Problem
Ken Weber makes a distinction in Maximum Entertainment that reframed how I think about every performance: there’s a difference between a performer and a delivery system. A delivery system presents effects. A performer presents a person who happens to do extraordinary things. The distinction seems subtle, but the audience response is radically different.
A delivery system holds attention only during the moments of magic. The transitions between effects are dead time — necessary logistics, like the pause between songs at a concert. The audience endures the transitions in anticipation of the next payoff.
A performer holds attention continuously. Not because every moment is magical, but because every moment is human. The performer’s personality, their stories, their reactions, their perspective — these create a continuous thread of engagement that carries the audience through the entire experience. The moments of magic become the peaks of a journey rather than isolated events separated by emptiness.
Without that continuous thread, you’re furniture. Furniture that does something interesting every few minutes, but furniture nonetheless. The audience doesn’t form a relationship with furniture. They use it and move on.
Why Stories Are the Answer
Stories are the most powerful tool for communicating who you are. Not the only tool — a smile, a reaction, eye contact all contribute — but the most direct and effective one. A personal story, told well, reveals your perspective, your humor, your values, your vulnerability, your humanity. In thirty seconds of honest storytelling, the audience learns more about who you are than they would in thirty minutes of technically flawless trickery.
This isn’t a performance principle. It’s a human one. Think about how you get to know people in real life. Not through their skills or their accomplishments. Through their stories. The friend who tells you about the time they got lost in Prague and ended up at the wrong wedding. The colleague who describes the disastrous client presentation that taught them to always have a backup plan. The family member who recounts a childhood memory so vividly that you feel like you were there.
Stories are how humans communicate identity. They’re how we broadcast who we are to the people around us. And they’re how audiences — who are, after all, just groups of individual humans — decide whether they want to invest emotionally in the performer standing in front of them.
The parallel in my consulting work is almost painfully direct. I’ve spent years helping clients communicate their strategies, their visions, their value propositions. And the single most consistent finding, across every industry and every context, is that data doesn’t move people. Analysis doesn’t inspire action. Charts and graphs inform, but they don’t persuade.
Stories persuade. Stories move. Stories are the vehicle through which abstract ideas become felt truths. The best consultants I’ve worked with are, without exception, the best storytellers. They don’t just present findings — they narrate a journey. They give the data a human face. They make the abstract concrete by anchoring it in specific, relatable experience.
Performance is the same. The effects are your data — impressive, demonstrable, verifiable. But without a story to give them context and meaning, they’re just data points. The audience processes them intellectually (“that was amazing”) rather than emotionally (“I felt something”).
The Big Three Test
Weber provides a framework for evaluating every moment in your show: the Big Three reactions. Every word you say and every action you take should target one of three responses — rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment. Anything that fails to produce one of these three reactions is filler. And filler is the enemy of engagement.
Applying this framework to stories means every story you tell in a performance must earn its place. It must captivate, amuse, or amaze — ideally some combination of all three. A story that merely fills time or provides background information fails the test. A story that makes the audience lean forward, or laugh, or gasp, passes it.
This is a ruthless standard, and it eliminates most stories that performers default to. “Let me tell you a little about myself” — filler. “I’ve been doing magic for X years” — filler. “I first became interested in this when” — filler, unless the “when” is genuinely captivating.
The stories that pass the Big Three test are specific, surprising, and emotionally resonant. They have a point. They reveal something. They create a reaction.
My Evolution from Silence to Stories
The transition from “performing in functional silence” to “performing with stories” didn’t happen overnight. It happened in stages, each one uncomfortable.
Stage one was the obvious move: adding scripted patter. Lines I’d written or borrowed that served as bridges between effects. Setup language. Introductions to routines. This was better than silence, but not by much, because the patter was impersonal. It could have been delivered by anyone. It didn’t reveal anything about who I was. It was words occupying space, not stories creating connection.
Stage two was tentative storytelling. I’d mention something about my background — the consulting work, the travel, the hotel rooms — as context for a routine. “I travel about two hundred nights a year for my consulting work, which means I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms with nothing but a deck of cards. And over those long evenings, I started noticing something interesting about…” This was better. It gave the audience a window into my actual life. But the stories were thin — functional context rather than genuine narrative.
Stage three, which I’m still working on, is honest storytelling. Real stories from my real life, with real emotional content, told with the specific detail and personal investment that makes stories resonate. The night I first performed for strangers and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely handle the cards. The time Adam and I were developing a new product for Vulpine Creations and the prototype failed spectacularly during a demonstration. The moment I realized, watching a video of my own performance, that I was technically competent and completely boring.
These stories are harder to tell because they require vulnerability. They expose imperfection. They show the audience a person who struggles, fails, doubts, and learns — not a polished professional who arrived fully formed.
And that’s exactly why they work.
Why Vulnerability Is the Secret Ingredient
Audiences don’t connect with perfection. They connect with humanity, and humanity includes imperfection. The performer who shares a moment of genuine struggle creates a bond with the audience that the performer who projects effortless mastery never can.
This doesn’t mean manufacturing vulnerability or performing weakness. It means being honest about the genuine experience of learning, growing, and occasionally failing. It means trusting the audience with real stories rather than presenting a curated highlight reel.
Think about the performers and public figures who generate the deepest audience loyalty. Almost without exception, they’re the ones who have shared their struggles. Who have been honest about difficulties. Who have shown the audience the person behind the persona.
David Copperfield — the biggest name in magic for decades — does something remarkable in the middle of his massive, technology-driven productions. He stops and tells personal stories. Stories about his family, his childhood, his feelings. Stories that could easily be dismissed as sentimental. And they work, devastatingly well, because they give the audience something that no amount of spectacle can provide: the feeling of knowing the person on stage.
The grand illusions demonstrate what Copperfield can do. The stories reveal who Copperfield is. And the audience remembers the stories.
The Consulting Connection
The parallel to my professional life runs deep here, and it’s one I think about constantly.
The best strategy presentations I’ve ever been part of were built around stories. Not just data narratives — although those matter — but genuine stories about the people affected by the strategy. A CEO describing the moment they realized their business model was obsolete. A frontline employee recounting the customer interaction that revealed a fundamental problem. A team leader admitting that their initial approach was wrong and describing how they pivoted.
These moments — honest, specific, emotionally true — are what transform a strategy presentation from an intellectual exercise into a shared experience. The audience moves from evaluating the analysis to feeling the stakes. They move from “is this correct?” to “this matters.”
In magic, the mechanism is identical. When I weave a genuine personal story into a routine, the audience moves from watching a trick to sharing an experience. The trick becomes the vehicle for the story, not the other way around. The impossible moment gains emotional weight because it’s connected to something human and real.
Without the story, the trick is a data point — impressive but isolated. With the story, the trick is the punctuation of a narrative — the exclamation point at the end of something the audience cares about.
What I Tell Stories About
The stories that work best in my performances aren’t planned in the traditional sense. They’re drawn from my actual life and refined through repetition, the same way any good storyteller refines material over time.
I tell stories about learning magic as an adult. About the absurdity of a forty-year-old strategy consultant sitting in a hotel room at midnight, watching online tutorials and fumbling with a deck of cards. About the first time a trick actually worked and the disbelief I felt — not that the trick worked, but that I had made it work.
I tell stories about travel. About the strange intimacy of hotel rooms, the ritual of unpacking just enough to feel settled, the way a deck of cards became my companion on the road. About the time I practiced a particular routine so many times in a hotel in Brussels that the room next door complained about the sound of cards being handled.
I tell stories about failure. About the show where I lost the audience in the first three minutes and spent the next twenty-seven trying to get them back. About the time I was so focused on my technique that I forgot to look at the audience and performed an entire routine to the top of someone’s head. About the humbling gap between how good I thought I was and how good the video revealed me to be.
And I tell stories about wonder. About the first time I saw a piece of magic that genuinely amazed me — not as a child, but as a skeptical adult who thought magic was for kids. About the moment when I understood that the experience of impossibility is one of the few genuinely shared human experiences left in an age of explanation. About why I do this, and what it means to me, and why I think it matters.
These stories don’t replace the magic. They enhance it. They give the audience a framework for understanding what they’re watching. Not a technical framework — they don’t need to understand the mechanics. An emotional framework. They understand the person performing for them. They understand his journey, his passion, his fallibility. And that understanding transforms the tricks from demonstrations into gifts.
The Animated Prop, Retired
I still catch myself slipping into delivery-system mode occasionally. It happens when I’m tired, or when the audience is particularly reserved, or when I’m performing material I know so well that autopilot kicks in. The stories recede. The personality dims. The functional operator resurfaces, moving efficiently from effect to effect with nothing but logistics in between.
When I catch it, I course-correct. I drop a story in. I make an observation about the room. I respond to something a specific audience member is doing or saying. I remind myself that the tricks are the reason they came, but the person performing them is the reason they’ll remember the evening.
The animated prop was efficient. He got through the set cleanly, hit every mark, delivered every effect on time. He was a well-oiled machine.
But nobody remembers a machine. They remember the person who stood in front of them and said, in essence: let me tell you something about myself. Let me show you who I am. Let me share something with you that matters to me.
That’s what stories do. They take a magic show and make it a human experience. They take a performer and make him a person. And they take an audience from impressed to invested — which is the only destination that matters.