I need to tell you about two performers I watched within the same week. Neither of them knows they changed how I think about this craft, and I am going to keep their names out of it because the point is not about them specifically. It is about something much bigger.
The first was at a magic convention. He was technically extraordinary. His sleight of hand was so clean it was almost invisible. His routines were ingeniously constructed, his method choices elegant, his timing precise. From a craft perspective, he was operating at a level I could only admire from a distance. Every magician in the room knew they were watching a master.
The audience was respectful. They applauded at the right moments. They acknowledged the skill. And when it was over, they moved on to the next thing. There was no buzz afterward. No cluster of people saying, “Did you see that?” No emotional residue. The performance had been consumed and forgotten in the time it took to walk to the bar.
The second performer was at a corporate event a few days later. He was good — competent, polished, clearly experienced. But from a technical standpoint, he was nowhere near the first performer’s level. I spotted a few moments that a skilled eye would catch. His material was solid but not groundbreaking.
The audience loved him. Not polite appreciation. Love. They laughed with him, leaned toward him, cheered for him. When his set ended, people were still talking about him an hour later. The event organizer told me it was the best entertainment they had ever booked.
The difference was not technique. It was not material. It was not production value or experience or any of the things we typically use to evaluate performers.
The difference was that the second performer was loveable. And the first, for all his brilliance, was not.
The Loveability Factor
Ken Weber names this quality directly in Maximum Entertainment. He calls it the loveability factor, and he argues it is one of the most important and least discussed elements of performance success. Some performers have an indefinable quality that makes audiences want them to succeed. Want to be on their side. Want to laugh at their jokes and gasp at their reveals and tell their friends about the experience.
It is not exactly charisma, though charisma is part of it. It is not exactly warmth, though warmth is essential. It is something more specific: the ability to make an audience feel that you are one of them, that you are accessible, that the barrier between stage and seats is permeable.
Denny Haney put it with beautiful simplicity: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it.”
That sentence sounds like it should be printed on a t-shirt and sold at magic shops. But it contains a truth that most performers — myself very much included — spend years failing to understand.
My Loveability Deficit
In my early performing days, I was not loveable on stage. I was competent. I was professional. I was, if I am being honest, slightly intimidating.
This was not intentional. Or rather, it was unintentionally intentional. My background is in strategy consulting, an industry where competence and authority are the currency. You earn respect by demonstrating that you are smart, prepared, and in control. You do not earn respect by being warm and fuzzy. The consultants I admired most were the sharpest, not the friendliest.
I brought that entire framework into my performing. I wanted the audience to respect my skill. To see me as impressive, commanding, authoritative. I wanted them to think: this person knows what he is doing.
And they did think that. But they did not feel warmth toward me. They did not root for me. They admired from a distance, the same way you admire a well-made piece of machinery. Impressive, functional, and entirely without soul.
I remember performing at a networking event in Graz, and afterward a colleague who had watched the set said: “You were great, but you seemed a bit… untouchable.” He struggled to find the word, but I knew exactly what he meant. I had built a wall of competence between myself and the audience, and I was standing behind it, safe and impressive and alone.
What Loveability Actually Is
After spending a long time thinking about this — watching performers who have it, studying what they do differently, examining my own instincts — I have come to believe that loveability is made up of a few specific, learnable components.
The first is accessibility. Loveable performers feel reachable. There is something in their manner that communicates: I am not above you. I am with you. We are doing this together. This is not humility, exactly — many loveable performers are quite confident. It is more like a door that stays open. The audience always feels they could walk through it.
The second is genuine enjoyment. Loveable performers visibly enjoy what they are doing. Not performed enjoyment — the big fake smile, the “Isn’t this great?!” energy. Actual enjoyment. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they respond to audience reactions, in the small moments of delight that are clearly unrehearsed. They are having fun, and the audience feels invited to have fun with them.
The third is vulnerability. This connects to what I discussed in an earlier post about Copperfield’s “sappy” stories. Loveable performers let you see the person behind the performer. They share something real — a moment of uncertainty, a genuine reaction, a personal detail that has no strategic purpose. This is not weakness. It is the opposite. It is the confidence to be human in a context that encourages artificiality.
The fourth is generosity. Loveable performers give the audience the credit, the spotlight, the best moments. They are not performing at the audience. They are performing for the audience. The distinction is subtle but profound. A performer who is performing at you is using you as a surface to project onto. A performer who is performing for you is creating an experience that is about your enjoyment, not their display.
The Consulting Mirror
Here is something I have observed in twenty years of consulting that maps onto this perfectly: clients hire people they like.
Not people they admire. Not the most technically brilliant option. Not the firm with the most impressive case studies or the most sophisticated methodology. They hire people they like being in a room with. People they trust. People they want to spend the next six months working alongside.
I have watched technically brilliant consultants lose pitches to warmer, more personable competitors. Not because the client was stupid or did not value expertise. Because, all else being roughly equal, people choose to work with people who make them feel good.
This is not cynical. It is human. We are social animals. We are wired to form bonds, to trust people who show us warmth, to invest our attention and loyalty in people who make us feel valued. No amount of technical skill overrides this wiring.
The same is true in performance. An audience will forgive technical imperfections from a performer they love. They will actively root for that performer to succeed. They will lean in, participate willingly, laugh generously, and remember the experience fondly. Because the experience was not just about the magic. It was about the person.
An audience watching a technically perfect but emotionally distant performer will give polite respect. They will not give love. And the difference between respect and love, in terms of career outcomes, is enormous.
The Performers Who Have It
I have been fortunate, through Vulpine Creations and the magic community more broadly, to meet and watch a wide range of performers. And the pattern is remarkably consistent.
The performers who work the most, who get rebooked, who build sustainable careers — they are not always the most skilled. They are almost always the most likeable. They walk into a room and people are drawn to them. Not because of anything they do consciously, but because of something they radiate: an interest in other people, a warmth, a genuine delight in the human interaction that performance creates.
Adam and I talk about this at Vulpine Creations all the time. When we are evaluating new products or concepts, one of the questions we always come back to is: does this help the performer connect with the audience? Because we have seen, over and over, that the products that succeed are the ones that create moments of connection, not just moments of impossibility.
The impossible moment is the hook. The human connection is what makes them come back.
Learning to Be Loveable
Can you learn loveability? I believe you can, though not in the way you might expect.
You cannot learn loveability by performing loveability. If you try to seem warm, you will seem like a person trying to seem warm, which is its own kind of distance. The audience can sense the performance of warmth the way they can sense the performance of surprise — it reads as fake because it is fake.
What you can learn is to remove the barriers that prevent your natural warmth from reaching the audience. And for most performers, those barriers are fear-based.
I was not unlovable on stage because I am an unlovable person. My friends would object to that characterization rather forcefully. I was unlovable on stage because I was afraid — afraid of not being impressive enough, afraid of seeming amateurish, afraid of the vulnerability that comes with letting an audience see the real person behind the performance.
So I built walls. Competence walls. Authority walls. Technical precision walls. And those walls, which were supposed to protect me, were actually blocking the very quality that would have made my performances memorable.
The work was not learning to be loveable. The work was learning to stop hiding.
Practical Changes
I made a series of small, deliberate changes over about a year. None of them involved new effects or techniques. All of them involved the space between me and the audience.
I started smiling more — not a performed smile, but giving myself permission to enjoy the moment visibly. I had been so focused on appearing in control that I had suppressed my own enjoyment.
I started sharing credit with the audience and especially with volunteers. Instead of framing the magic as something I did, I began framing it as something we discovered together. “Did you feel that?” instead of “Watch this.”
I started allowing moments of genuine uncertainty to show. Not incompetence — but the honest human response of being in an unpredictable situation. When a volunteer did something unexpected, instead of smoothly covering, I would sometimes let the surprise show. “I genuinely did not expect you to say that” — said with warmth and amusement rather than anxiety.
I started talking to people before and after the show as the same person I was during the show. This sounds obvious, but it was not. My pre-show persona had been different from my on-stage persona, which was different from my post-show persona. The audience could feel the character switch, even if they could not articulate it. When I stopped switching — when I was the same person before, during, and after — something clicked.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here is the thing nobody in the magic community wants to say out loud: loveability matters more than skill for career success.
A highly loveable performer with moderate skill will work more, earn more, get rebooked more, and build a more sustainable career than a highly skilled performer with low loveability. This is not fair. It is not what we want to believe. Every performer wants to think that if they just get good enough, the audiences will come.
But audiences do not hire technique. Event organizers do not rebook precision. Clients do not refer skill. They hire, rebook, and refer people they liked being around. People who made the evening feel special. People who made the audience feel valued.
This does not mean skill does not matter. It does. You need to be good enough that your technique supports rather than undermines the experience. But “good enough” is a lower bar than most performers think, and the bar for loveability is higher than most performers realize.
I spent years trying to be the best performer in the room. I should have spent those years trying to be the one the audience was happiest to have in it.
Where I Am Now
I am not going to pretend I have fully cracked this. Loveability is not a destination — it is a daily practice. Some nights I feel the connection with the audience immediately. Some nights I have to work for it. Some nights, honestly, I fall back into my old patterns and catch myself building the competence wall again.
But I know what the goal is now, and that knowledge has changed everything about how I prepare, how I perform, and how I evaluate my own shows.
The question is no longer: was I impressive? The question is: did they like having me there?
If the answer is yes, everything else follows. The magic lands harder. The impossible moments hit deeper. The evening becomes memorable.
And if the answer is no — if they respected me but did not warm to me, admired me but did not connect with me — then all the technical excellence in the world does not matter.
Denny Haney was right. It does not matter what you do, as long as they like you while you are doing it.
The most important skill in performance is not in your hands. It is in the space between you and the people watching.