There is a story that Ken Weber tells in Maximum Entertainment that I think about more often than any other piece of performance advice I have ever encountered. It is about a young performer — eager, talented, desperate to impress — auditioning for an agent. The kid is pulling out every stop. Flashy moves. Big energy. Trying to be everything he thinks the business wants. Trying to be impressive in the way he imagines impressive is supposed to look.
And the agent watches all of it, and when the kid is done, sweating and breathless and hoping, the agent says: “Kid, I like you. Be yourself.”
Five words. No technical notes. No critique of material or timing or effect selection. Just: I like you. Be yourself.
Every time I revisit this story, I find a new layer in it. At first I thought it was simply about authenticity — stop pretending, start being real. And that is certainly part of it. But the more I have performed, and the more I have watched other performers, the more I have come to believe it contains something deeper. Something about the relationship between trying and connecting, between effort and ease, between what you push at an audience and what you allow them to discover.
The Trying Problem
The young performer in the story is working hard. That is the problem. Not that working hard is bad in general — the previous twenty posts in this series have been about how hard you should work at your craft. But there is a crucial difference between working hard in preparation and working hard in performance.
In preparation, effort is everything. You rehearse until the mechanics are invisible. You script until the words feel natural. You practice until the difficult things look effortless. The work is enormous, and it is invisible to the audience by design.
In performance, visible effort is poison. When the audience can see you trying, they feel the strain. When they feel the strain, they cannot relax. When they cannot relax, they cannot enjoy themselves. And when they cannot enjoy themselves, they cannot connect with you.
The kid in the story was trying to impress. And the agent could feel the trying. It was radiating off him like heat. Every trick, every line, every gesture said: look at me, be impressed, think I am worth your time. And the irony — the devastating, universal irony — is that the trying itself was the thing preventing the impression he wanted to make.
I know this irony intimately because I lived it.
My Corporate Event Phase
When I first started performing at corporate events — this was maybe a year into seriously developing a show, doing events in Vienna and Innsbruck mostly — I was acutely aware that I was not a “real” magician. I was a consultant who did magic. A businessperson who happened to perform. And in front of corporate audiences, many of whom were my professional peers, I felt an intense pressure to prove that I was good enough. That I was not just some hobbyist inflicting his hobby on a captive audience.
So I tried. Hard. Every effect was delivered with maximum intensity. Every transition was polished to a shine. I made sure the audience could see how much skill was involved. I wanted them to walk away thinking: that was a real performer, not some guy from the finance department who learned a card trick.
And the shows were fine. Technically, they were probably among my better performances, because the adrenaline of trying so hard kept me sharp. But the audience response was always slightly less than what the effort warranted. Polite applause, appreciative comments, but rarely the warmth or enthusiasm that makes you think: yes, that landed.
It was after a show in Graz — a corporate Christmas event, maybe sixty people — that someone said something to me that echoed Weber’s agent story without either of us knowing it. A woman who had been in the audience approached me at the bar afterward and said: “You are much more relaxed now than you were during the show. I wish the show had felt like this.”
She was not a magic person. She was not speaking in performance theory terms. She was just telling me, plainly, that the person she was talking to at the bar was more enjoyable than the person she had watched on stage thirty minutes earlier.
The bar version of Felix was not trying to impress anyone. He was just talking. Sharing stories. Being curious about other people. Making observations that occasionally got laughs. Being, in other words, himself.
What “Be Yourself” Actually Requires
The problem with “be yourself” as advice is that it sounds passive. As if you just need to stop doing something and the right thing will emerge. But it is not passive at all. It is one of the most active, difficult things you can do as a performer.
Being yourself on stage requires that you have done enough preparation that you do not need to think about what comes next. If you are worrying about the next move, the next line, the next transition, you cannot be present. You cannot be yourself because your attention is consumed by the mechanics.
Being yourself requires that you have enough confidence in your material to let it breathe. If you are anxious about whether the effect will work, you overperform it. You push harder. You try to force the reaction rather than allowing it to happen.
Being yourself requires that you have made peace with who you actually are. Not the person you wish you were. Not the performer you think the audience wants. The actual person. With all the quirks and imperfections and idiosyncrasies that make you a specific human being rather than a generic performer.
This is why the agent’s note is so powerful and so difficult simultaneously. He is not telling the kid to do less. He is telling the kid to trust himself. To believe that the person behind the trying — the person the agent could see flashes of between the big moves — is more compelling than the performance he has constructed.
The Trust Gap
I call it the trust gap, and I think it is the central obstacle to authenticity in performance. The gap between what you are and what you believe the audience needs you to be.
When the gap is wide — when you believe the audience needs something very different from who you are — you build elaborate structures to bridge it. Characters. Personas. Vocal shifts. Energy levels that do not match your natural register. You construct a performer to fill the space between your real self and your imagined audience expectations.
When the gap is narrow — when you believe that who you are is close enough to what the audience needs — the construction effort decreases. You still prepare, still polish, still rehearse. But you are polishing a version of yourself rather than constructing someone else.
And when the gap closes entirely — when you arrive at the rare and beautiful state of believing that who you are is exactly what the audience needs — the effort becomes invisible. Not because there is no effort. Because the effort is channelled entirely into being present, responsive, and real, rather than into maintaining a fabrication.
The agent saw a kid whose trust gap was enormous. The kid did not believe he was enough, so he was building furiously, layer upon layer of performance, hoping that if he stacked enough impressive moments on top of each other, the audience would not notice the uncertain person underneath.
But the agent did notice. Not the uncertainty — the person. “I like you,” he said. Meaning: the person I can see through all this trying is likeable. Stop covering him up.
Closing My Own Trust Gap
My trust gap has narrowed considerably over the years, but I will not pretend it is closed. There are still shows where I feel the pull to try harder, to be more impressive, to push energy at the audience rather than sharing it with them.
It happens most often with audiences I perceive as sophisticated or skeptical. High-level executives. Fellow entrepreneurs. People I imagine are evaluating me critically. With these audiences, my consulting brain kicks in — the part of me that has spent decades being evaluated in boardrooms — and the trying ramps up automatically.
What helps me catch it is a simple question I ask myself before every show now, a question directly inspired by the agent’s note: “What would I do if I already knew they liked me?”
The answer is always the same. I would relax. I would talk to them instead of performing at them. I would let the humor come naturally instead of engineering it. I would share my genuine fascination with the material instead of demonstrating my mastery of it. I would be the person at the bar, not the person on stage.
Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I do not. But asking the question shifts something in my preparation, my mindset, and my first moments in front of the audience. It reminds me that connection is not something you achieve through effort. It is something you allow by being present.
The Agent’s Other Lesson
There is a second lesson in the story that I only noticed recently. The agent said two things, not one. He said “I like you” first. And then he said “Be yourself.”
The order matters. He did not say “Be yourself and maybe I will like you.” He said “I already like you. Now stop getting in the way of that.”
This is the thing most performers miss. The audience, in most cases, already wants to like you. They have paid money, or their company has booked entertainment, or they have chosen to attend an event where magic will happen. They are predisposed to enjoy the experience. They are on your side before you say a word.
The trying, the performing, the effort to impress — these are solutions to a problem that usually does not exist. The audience does not need to be convinced. They need to be allowed to connect. And the connecting happens not through what you show them but through who you are.
I think about the woman at the Christmas party in Graz who said she wished the show had felt like the conversation at the bar. She was not asking for better tricks. She was not asking for more impressive technique. She was asking for the person. The real one. The one who showed up when the trying stopped.
“Kid, I like you. Be yourself.”
It is the simplest note any performer will ever receive. It is also the hardest one to follow. Not because being yourself is complicated. But because trusting that yourself is enough — that is the work of a lifetime.
I am still doing that work. Every show. Every audience. Every time I feel the pull to try harder, I try instead to trust more.
Some nights it works. Some nights it does not. But the nights it works are the nights the audience talks about afterward. Not because the magic was better. Because the person was real.