In the last post, I talked about the convention performer whose lecture was better than his act. The diagnosis was clear: inauthenticity. The performer was hiding behind a persona that was less compelling than the real person underneath. The prescription was equally clear: be yourself. The polished version. But yourself.
Simple enough, right?
Except there is a case that complicates the prescription rather significantly. A case I have been circling around for weeks, because it challenges the neat narrative of “just be yourself and everything works.” A case where the performer was absolutely, unquestionably himself — and it still was not enough.
Max Maven.
The Undeniable Brilliance
If you are not deep into the magic world, you may not know the name, though you may have seen the face. Max Maven was one of the most distinctive-looking performers in the history of magic — dark, angular, intellectual, with a shock of dyed black hair and a gaze that could pin you to the back wall of the theatre. He was a mentalist, a magic theorist, a historian, a consultant to other performers, and by any reasonable measure one of the most gifted minds the art form has ever produced.
His understanding of magic was encyclopedic. His effects were brilliantly constructed. He could lecture for hours about the theory and history and psychology of magic and hold a room full of professionals in rapt attention. He was witty, sharp, and intellectually formidable.
He was also, by all accounts, exactly himself on stage. There was no disconnect between the person and the performer. Maven had committed to a very specific vision of who he was as an artist, and he inhabited it completely. There was no veneer. No costume over a different person. What you saw on stage was what you got.
And yet.
The Weber Critique
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, raises Maven as a case study that I have found myself returning to again and again. Weber’s argument is nuanced but pointed: Maven had all the tools. All the talent. All the knowledge. But he made a deliberate artistic choice to project separateness rather than connection. His stage presence was built around otherness — dark, intellectual, deliberately set apart from the audience. He conveyed mystery and intelligence, but not warmth. Not accessibility. Not what Weber calls the loveability factor.
The result, Weber suggests, was that audiences respected Maven without warming to him. They admired without loving. And in the calculus of entertainment, love beats admiration every time.
This is the paradox that has been occupying me: you can be completely, authentically yourself, and if yourself is someone who keeps the audience at arm’s length, the authenticity does not solve the connection problem. It might even make it worse.
Why This Matters to Me
I bring this up because I recognize something of myself in the Maven paradox, and I suspect many readers will too.
My background is in strategy consulting. I spent years in boardrooms where being the sharpest person in the room was the currency. Where intellectual authority was how you earned respect. Where being warm and fuzzy was, at best, a secondary consideration and, at worst, a liability. You earned your place by being smart, prepared, and slightly intimidating in your command of the material.
When I started performing, I carried that framework with me without realizing it. I wanted audiences to respect my intelligence. I wanted them to see that I was not just some guy doing tricks — that there was depth, sophistication, intellectual weight behind what I was doing. I wanted them to think: this person is brilliant.
And some of them probably did think that. But thinking someone is brilliant and wanting to spend an evening with them are different things. I was building a Maven-shaped wall without knowing it — projecting competence and intelligence while inadvertently blocking the warmth that makes people lean in rather than sit back.
The Distance Spectrum
I have thought about this a great deal, and I think the key is understanding that there is a spectrum of distance in performance, and only a very narrow band of it works.
On one end, you have the performer who is so desperate to be liked that they are cloying, saccharine, needy. They laugh too hard at their own jokes. They fish for applause. They treat the audience like they are auditioning for friendship. This is not warmth — this is neediness, and audiences recoil from it.
On the other end, you have the performer who is so committed to mystique and separateness that they have sealed themselves off from the audience entirely. They are impressive from a distance, like a mountain. But nobody invites a mountain out for coffee.
The sweet spot — the narrow band — is somewhere in the middle. Close enough that the audience feels connected. Far enough that they feel the performer has something special. Human enough to be loved. Extraordinary enough to be worth watching.
Maven, by most accounts, lived on the distant end of this spectrum. Not by accident. By choice. And the question is whether the artistic integrity of that choice outweighs the connection cost.
What I Learned from My Own Distance Phase
I went through a period — maybe six months, around the time I was first performing at corporate events in Vienna and Salzburg — where I deliberately cultivated a more mysterious, intense stage presence. I was reading Derren Brown at the time, fascinated by his idea of withholding power, of letting the audience sense something deeper beneath the surface. And I thought: yes. That is what I want. I want them to feel that there is more going on than they can see.
The problem was that I had the concept right but the execution wrong. Brown, on television and on stage, is magnetic precisely because he balances the intensity with genuine humor, with flashes of warmth, with moments where the mask drops and you see a real person underneath. He is mysterious and accessible at the same time. The withholding works because you can feel the warmth being withheld, which means you know it is there.
I was just withholding. All distance, no warmth underneath. I was not being mysterious. I was being cold. And the audience feedback reflected it — technically impressive, but hard to connect with. One event organizer in Linz said something that stung: “The magic was excellent, but some guests said they were not sure if you were enjoying yourself.” She meant it kindly. But the implication was clear. If the audience cannot tell whether you are having a good time, they cannot fully have a good time either.
The Counterargument
I want to be fair to Maven’s choice, and to anyone who deliberately cultivates distance as an artistic strategy. There are performers who have built extraordinary careers on separateness. There are performers whose mystique is their brand, whose remoteness is part of the appeal, who have found audiences willing to invest in the enigma.
But these cases share a common thread: the distance is total and committed. It is not accidental. It is not a half-measure. And crucially, the audiences who love these performers tend to be niche audiences — people who actively seek out the unusual, the cerebral, the challenging. These are not the audiences at a corporate holiday party in Graz. They are not the audiences at a networking event or a product launch or a wedding reception.
For most performing contexts — and certainly for the contexts I work in, which are corporate events, keynotes, private shows — the Maven model carries a significant cost. The audience is not self-selected for intellectual challenge. They want a good time. They want to feel good. They want to connect with the person on stage and walk away feeling that they shared something.
If your stage presence says “admire me from afar,” most corporate audiences will do exactly that. They will admire from afar. And then they will forget you, because admiration without connection does not stick in the memory the way warmth does.
Finding the Accessible Version of Intelligence
What I eventually figured out — and I am still refining this — is that the answer is not to hide my intellectual side. That would be its own form of inauthenticity, and the audience would sense it. The answer is to find the accessible version of intelligence.
Here is what I mean. Intelligence, projected at people, reads as intimidation. Intelligence, shared with people, reads as fascination. The difference is subtle but critical. When I stand on stage and demonstrate that I know things the audience does not know, I am creating distance. When I stand on stage and genuinely share my fascination with how the mind works, how decisions are made, why people think the way they do, I am creating connection.
The content is similar. The framing is completely different.
I started reframing my mentalism pieces not as demonstrations of my abilities but as explorations of the audience’s abilities. Not “watch what I can do” but “let me show you what your mind is doing right now.” The focus shifted from me being clever to the audience being fascinating. And that shift, which required almost no change to the actual effects, transformed the audience response.
They were still impressed. But now they were impressed and engaged. Impressed and leaning forward. Impressed and talking to each other. The intelligence was still there — it had to be, because it is genuinely who I am — but it was being channeled through curiosity rather than display.
The Maven Lesson
I do not think the Maven paradox is a cautionary tale about being too talented or too smart. I think it is a cautionary tale about confusing artistic integrity with audience connection. Both matter. But they are not the same thing, and excellence in one does not automatically produce the other.
You can be entirely yourself — authentic, committed, uncompromising — and still fail to connect with an audience. Because being yourself is necessary but not sufficient. The additional requirement is that the version of yourself you bring to the stage must include an open door. The audience needs to feel they can walk through it. They need to sense that for all your ability, for all the extraordinary things happening in front of them, you are still a person they could have a conversation with. A person who sees them. A person who is doing this for them, not just for the art.
Maven, by all accounts, kept the door closed. He was brilliant behind it. But the audience was on the other side.
My Current Approach
I think about the Maven paradox before almost every show. Not because I am in danger of becoming Maven — I do not have that level of talent, for one thing, and my natural personality is warmer than his chosen persona. But because the temptation to retreat into competence is always there for me. It is my consulting-brain default. When I feel uncertain, when the audience is challenging, when I am not sure I am connecting, my instinct is to lean harder into being impressive rather than leaning harder into being human.
The Maven paradox reminds me that this instinct, while understandable, is exactly wrong. When connection is failing, the answer is not more skill. It is more warmth. Not more demonstration. More sharing. Not more distance. More humanity.
Be yourself. Yes. Absolutely. But make sure the self you are being has a door the audience can walk through.
The brilliance means nothing if they are watching it through glass.