One hundred posts. I had no idea, when I started this blog, that I would reach this number. I am not going to make a big production of it — that is not really my style — but I want to acknowledge the milestone briefly before diving into today’s topic, which feels fitting for a moment of reflection.
When I began writing about my journey from strategy consultant to performing magician, I was mostly writing for myself. Trying to organize what I was learning, make sense of the books I was studying, find the thread that connected my old world to my new one. The fact that people are reading along is something I remain genuinely grateful for.
Now. Let me tell you about something I keep seeing.
The Pattern
I was at a magic convention about a year ago — I will not name the specific event because the person I am about to describe does not deserve to be singled out for something that applies to half the performers in the room. This person got on stage for his act, and he was good. Really good. Technically excellent material, well-rehearsed, polished transitions, strong effects. The audience — mostly magicians, which is a tough crowd in its own right — gave him solid applause. Respect was clearly earned.
The next day, the same person gave a lecture. He walked to the front of the room, sat on a stool, and started talking about his approach to magic. No performance script. No rehearsed timing. Just a person sharing what he had learned over twenty years of performing.
He was extraordinary.
Not in a different way. In a better way. He was funnier during the lecture than during the act. More engaging. More human. He told stories that had the room in tears — both of laughter and of genuine emotion. He was self-deprecating without being weak, confident without being arrogant. He made eye contact naturally, responded to the room spontaneously, shared genuine enthusiasm about his craft that was infectious and moving.
When the lecture ended, the applause was significantly louder and longer than it had been for his act the night before. And as I sat there clapping, I realized I was watching one of the most revealing patterns in all of performance.
The Weber Observation
Ken Weber identifies this exact phenomenon in Maximum Entertainment. He observed that at convention after convention, performers gave brilliant, engaging lectures and then followed them with acts that were stiff, artificial, and comparatively lifeless. The same people who were warm and funny and captivating while being themselves became rigid and distant the moment they “performed.”
Why? Because during the lecture, they were being themselves. During the act, they were performing a character that did not fit.
The lecture was improvised, spontaneous, rooted in the person’s real personality and genuine enthusiasm. The act was scripted, rehearsed, and filtered through a performance persona that — in too many cases — bore little resemblance to the actual human being underneath.
This is not a talent problem. The talent is clearly there — the lecture proves it. It is an authenticity problem. The performer has talent and charisma and the ability to captivate a room. But they have been conditioned to believe that performance requires a different version of themselves, and that different version is less compelling than the original.
My Own Convention Experience
I recognized this pattern because I had lived it.
The first time I attended a magic convention after I had started performing seriously, I was acutely aware of the gap between how I felt at the hotel bar and how I felt on stage. At the bar, talking to other magicians, swapping stories, discussing theory, I was comfortable. Engaged. Funny, even — or at least the people laughing seemed to think so. I was being myself in a community of people who shared my obsession.
Then I got up for a performance session, and something shifted. I could feel it physically — a tightening, a narrowing. My voice changed. My body language changed. I became the Performing Version of Felix, which was a more controlled, more serious, less spontaneous version of the person who had been holding court at the bar an hour earlier.
I was not bad. The performance was competent. But it was also somehow smaller than the person who had given it. As if by stepping into “performance mode,” I had filtered out the qualities that made me most engaging in normal human interaction.
The magician I was sitting with afterward said something I have never forgotten: “You’re a different person up there.” He meant it as an observation, not a criticism. But it hit me as a criticism, because I knew he was right. And I knew the person at the bar was more interesting than the person on stage.
Why This Happens
I have thought about this a great deal, and I believe the lecture-versus-act gap comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what performance is.
Most of us, when we learn to perform, absorb an implicit message: performance is special. It is different from normal interaction. It requires a heightened state, a different mode of being. You do not just get up and be yourself. You get up and perform.
This message is not entirely wrong. Performance does require energy, projection, and a level of intentionality that casual conversation does not. But somewhere in the translation, most performers over-correct. They interpret “performance is different from normal” as “I must become someone different from normal.” And so they construct a performance self that is supposed to be more compelling than their everyday self.
The irony is savage. The performance self is almost always less compelling. Because it is constructed. It is assembled from borrowed pieces — bits of other performers, assumptions about what audiences want, cliches absorbed from watching magic on television. It has no roots. It is a costume worn over the real person, and like all costumes, it restricts movement.
The real person, meanwhile, has roots. Has specificity. Has the organic humor, the genuine enthusiasm, the natural charisma that comes from decades of being a particular human being with particular experiences and particular quirks. The real person is interesting because real people are interesting. The performance character is generic because performance characters, unless developed with extraordinary care, tend toward the generic.
The Max Maven Question
Weber raises a fascinating case study that complicates this discussion in a useful way. Max Maven was, by any measure, one of the most talented and knowledgeable performers in magic history. His understanding of the craft was encyclopedic. His effects were brilliantly constructed. His stage presence was utterly distinctive — dark, intellectual, deliberately otherworldly.
But Weber argues that Maven’s choice to project separateness rather than humanity limited his mainstream breakthrough. He had all the talent, all the tools, all the knowledge. But he deliberately chose a performance identity that kept the audience at a distance. He conveyed mystery and intelligence, but not warmth. Not accessibility. Not the loveability factor that allows audiences to fully invest in a performer.
This is a complex observation because Maven’s character was clearly intentional. He was not accidentally distant. He had made a specific artistic choice to project a particular kind of presence, and he committed to it with total discipline. From an artistic standpoint, you could argue it was a valid and even admirable choice.
But from a career standpoint — from the standpoint of connecting with mainstream audiences, of building the kind of broad appeal that sustains a performing career — Weber suggests the choice had costs. And the specific cost was that audiences respected Maven without warming to him. They admired without loving. And in the calculus of entertainment, love beats admiration.
I think about this often because it highlights an important nuance. Being yourself is not the same as being accessible. There are people whose authentic selves are naturally remote, intense, cerebral. For those performers, “be yourself” does not automatically solve the loveability problem. It might even exacerbate it.
The answer, I think, is not to fake warmth — that would be exactly the kind of artificial persona that creates the problem. The answer is to find the aspects of your real self that do connect, and to amplify those while keeping the rest authentic. Even the most cerebral, intense person laughs with friends, shows vulnerability to people they trust, has moments of genuine warmth. The question is whether those moments make it onto the stage.
The Counterpoint: When Distance Works
I should be fair. There are performers who have built successful careers on deliberate distance and mystique. They project an aura of otherness, of being not quite like the audience, and it works for them because they commit to it completely and the audience accepts it as a compelling character choice.
But these cases are rare, and they require a level of artistic commitment that most performers do not have. Partial distance — the kind most performers accidentally create by adopting an uncomfortable persona — does not read as mysterious or intriguing. It reads as awkward. As fake. As a person trying to be something they are not.
The safe bet, for almost everyone, is authenticity. Be yourself. Find the version of yourself that connects with others, and bring that version to the stage.
What I Learned from the Convention Circuit
Since that first convention experience, I have attended many more. And I now watch for the lecture-versus-act gap the way a doctor watches for symptoms. It is remarkably consistent.
Performer after performer gives a lecture that is engaging, funny, warm, and compelling. Then they perform an act that is technically impressive but emotionally flat. The audience connects with the lecturer and respects the performer, and these are not the same thing.
The ones who break the pattern — the performers whose acts are as engaging as their lectures — share a common quality. They have figured out how to bring the lecture version of themselves onto the performance stage. Their acts feel like conversations, not recitations. Their humor is the same humor they use when chatting backstage. Their warmth is the same warmth they show at the hotel bar.
These performers have not eliminated the gap between their offstage and onstage selves. They have minimized it. The performance version is slightly heightened, slightly more projected, slightly more intentional — but it is recognizably the same person. There is no costume. There is no veneer. There is just a person, in front of an audience, doing something extraordinary while being authentically, recognizably themselves.
The Consulting Connection
This pattern exists in consulting too, of course. I have watched hundreds of consultants present to clients over the years. The most effective presenters are the ones whose presentation style is an amplified version of their conversational style. They talk to a boardroom the same way they talk to a colleague over coffee — with more energy, more projection, more structure, but the same essential voice.
The least effective presenters are the ones who transform when they stand up. Their voice changes. Their vocabulary changes. They become Corporate Presentation Person, a generic character that could be anyone from any firm. The client can feel the shift, and it creates the same distance that a magician’s performance persona creates with an audience.
I once had a mentor in consulting who told me: “If you can’t present to fifty people the same way you explain something to one person, you’re doing it wrong.” He was talking about consulting. He could have been talking about magic.
Post One Hundred: What I Know Now
This is post one hundred. When I started, I was a consultant who had stumbled into magic through a deck of cards and a laptop in a hotel room. I had a bad childhood memory of a clown that had convinced me magic was not for adults. I had no performance background, no training, no community.
What I have now — one hundred posts later, years into this journey, having read and studied and practiced and performed and failed and sometimes succeeded — is a clearer understanding of what makes performance work.
And the clearest thing I understand is this: the performer is the performance. Not the effects. Not the techniques. Not the scripts or the props or the production. The person standing there, being themselves, sharing something real with a room full of other people. That is what creates the experience.
Everything in this Pillar Two series — the smile, the story, the acknowledgment of surroundings, the reaction to disruptions, the revealed emotions, the eye contact — points to the same truth. The audience does not want a perfect machine. They want a human being. They want you.
The convention performer whose lecture was better than his act knows this truth already. He demonstrates it every time he drops the character and just talks. He is brilliant, captivating, loveable when he is himself.
The challenge is simply this: to be that person all the time. On stage and off. In the lecture and in the act. Before the audience and in front of the mirror in the hotel room.
Be yourself. The polished version. The best version. But yourself.
One hundred posts in, and I am still working on it. I suspect I will be working on it for the rest of my performing life. But at least I know what the work is.
And that, it turns out, is most of the battle.