Here is an uncomfortable test. Take the script for any of your routines, strip your name from it, and ask whether another performer could deliver it word for word without changing anything. If the answer is yes — if the material is so generic that it could belong to anyone — then you have a problem. Not a technique problem. An identity problem.
I failed this test spectacularly about two years into performing. I had built what I thought was a solid thirty-minute set. The effects were strong. The scripts were polished. The transitions worked. I was proud of it. And then Adam asked me, casually, during one of our Vulpine Creations calls: “What part of your set could only be performed by you?”
I opened my mouth to answer and nothing came out. Because the honest answer was: none of it. My set was a collection of well-performed effects with scripts that could have been delivered by any moderately competent English-speaking performer. There was nothing in it that was uniquely, specifically, identifiably mine. Nothing that revealed who I was, where I came from, or why I was standing there.
I was interchangeable. And interchangeable is the death of a performing career.
The Missing Ingredient
Darwin Ortiz makes a point in Strong Magic that clarified this problem for me. He argues that when you tell a story in a performance context, you should personalize it — make yourself the protagonist. This is not ego. It is strategy. Personal stories create intimacy. They give the audience a window into who you are. They make the performance something that could only come from one specific human being.
But Ortiz is talking about individual stories within effects. What I eventually realized is that the principle extends much further. It is not just about telling personal anecdotes. It is about building your entire performing identity around the specific, irreplicable details of your actual life. Your history. Your profession. Your obsessions. Your mistakes. The things that happened to you and only you.
When I look at the performers who hold my attention most completely, they all share this quality. Their material is inseparable from their biography. You could not reassign their routines to another performer because the routines are built on foundations of personal experience that belong exclusively to them.
That was what my set was missing. Not personal stories as decoration. Personal truth as structure.
Starting with What I Actually Am
The process of injecting my life into my routines started with a brutally honest inventory of what makes my situation unusual. Not what makes me special — I am wary of that framing, because it sounds like self-congratulation. But what makes my path to this stage genuinely different from the paths of most performers.
Here is the list I wrote out, sitting in a hotel room in Salzburg late one night:
I am a strategy and innovation consultant. I travel constantly — or I used to, before the world changed, and I still travel a great deal. I discovered magic as an adult, in hotel rooms, because I needed something to occupy my mind and hands on the road. I could not bring my music with me, so I brought a deck of cards instead. I had a negative view of magic as a child because of a bad experience with a clown performer. I am analytical by training and by temperament. I co-founded a magic company, which still feels improbable. I came to mentalism through an interest in decision-making and cognitive psychology, not through an interest in the supernatural.
Looking at that list, I realized I had been sitting on a gold mine of specificity and ignoring it entirely. Every item on that list was a potential connection point with an audience. Every item was something that made my path distinctive. And none of it was in my show.
The Hotel Room Story
The first piece I reworked was my opener. I had been opening with a generic greeting and a quick effect — clean, professional, forgettable. I replaced it with a story.
I told the audience about being a consultant who spent two hundred nights a year in hotels. About the boredom, the restlessness, the loneliness of those rooms. About buying a deck of cards from an online tutorial site because I needed something for my hands while my mind was racing through the next day’s presentation. About sitting on the edge of the bed at midnight, laptop open to a tutorial video, trying to make a piece of cardboard do something it did not want to do.
This was not a polished piece of theatrical storytelling. It was conversational. Almost offhand. The way you would tell a friend about how a hobby started. And it ended with me holding up a deck of cards and saying: “This is where it started. A hotel room, a deck of cards, and the vague suspicion that I had lost my mind.”
The audience laughed. But more importantly, they leaned in. Because I had told them something real. Not a setup for a trick. A piece of my actual life. And in that moment, I was no longer a generic performer. I was a specific person with a specific story, and they were curious about where that story was going.
The Consulting Bridge
The biggest transformation came when I stopped hiding my consulting background and started using it as a bridge.
For years, I had treated consulting and magic as separate worlds. I was a consultant who did magic, but the consulting never appeared in the show. I thought it was irrelevant — or worse, that it undermined my credibility as a performer. Who wants to watch a magic show and be reminded that the guy on stage spends his weekdays in PowerPoint?
I was wrong. The consulting background turned out to be my strongest connection point, especially with corporate audiences.
I started framing my mentalism pieces through the lens of decision-making. I would talk about sitting in strategy meetings, watching executives make choices, noticing patterns in how people decide under uncertainty. I would describe the moment when I realized that the psychology I was studying for my consulting work was the same psychology that made mentalism possible. That the reason I could sometimes predict what someone would choose was not some supernatural ability — it was a deep fascination with how the human mind navigates decisions, trained over thousands of hours of watching people in high-stakes rooms.
This framing did several things simultaneously. It gave the audience a reason to believe in what I was doing — not as supernatural power, but as genuine psychological insight. It established me as someone with credentials and experience. It created a narrative thread that connected the pieces together. And it made every routine uniquely mine, because no other mentalist had spent twenty years in strategy consulting before stepping on stage.
The Childhood Clown Story
One of the most personal pieces I eventually added was the story of why I had a negative view of magic growing up. The childhood clown experience in Austria that had convinced me, for decades, that magic was children’s entertainment, not something for serious adults.
I was hesitant to include this because it felt vulnerable. Admitting that you once dismissed the very art form you now practice is not the most flattering revelation. But the audience response was immediate and powerful.
People related to it. Not specifically to the clown story, but to the broader experience of having a prejudice shattered by discovery. Many people in the audience held the same assumption I once did — that magic was trivial, that it was for birthday parties, that it was not something a grown adult should find profound. By telling them about my own version of that prejudice, and how it crumbled when I fell down the rabbit hole, I gave them permission to take what they were about to see seriously.
The story also served a structural function. It created a before-and-after in the audience’s mind. Before: a skeptical consultant who thought magic was silly. After: a person so transformed by the discovery that he co-founded a company around it. The distance between those two points generated curiosity. How did he get from there to here? What changed his mind? What was so powerful about this art form that it captured someone who had actively resisted it?
That curiosity carried the audience through the entire set. They were not just watching tricks. They were following a story. My story. The one that only I can tell.
The Practical Method
For anyone reading this who recognizes the interchangeability problem in their own material, here is the method I used. It is not complicated, but it requires honesty.
First, write out the five or six most defining facts about your life. Not the impressive facts. The specific facts. What makes your path to performance unusual? What do you do when you are not performing? What was your entry point into this craft? What do you care about outside of magic?
Second, look at each of your current routines and ask: where does my real life connect to this effect? Not as decoration — as structure. Not “I will mention I am a consultant to fill time” but “How does my being a consultant fundamentally change the meaning of this effect?”
Third, rewrite the connective tissue. The stories between effects. The introductions. The framing. Replace the generic with the specific. Replace what anyone could say with what only you can say.
Fourth, test it. The audience will tell you immediately whether the personal material is landing. When they lean in, when they laugh more warmly, when they look at you differently — you have found the seam where your life meets your performance.
The Test, Revisited
I take Adam’s test periodically now, applying it to my current set. Could another performer deliver my material unchanged?
The answer, finally, is no. Not because the effects are so unusual — many of them are built on principles that other performers also use. But because the framing, the stories, the perspective, the emotional architecture is built from materials that only I possess. The hotel rooms. The consulting background. The late-in-life discovery. The clown that put me off magic for decades. The improbable founding of a magic company. The analytical mind that approaches the psychology of magic from the boardroom rather than the stage.
These are not just stories I tell. They are the foundation my performance is built on. Remove them, and the show becomes generic. Include them, and it becomes mine.
This is what communicating your humanity actually means in practice. Not smiling at the audience — though that helps. Not telling a funny anecdote — though those are good. It means building your entire performing identity on the bedrock of who you actually are. Your real history. Your real passions. Your real quirks and contradictions and embarrassing origin stories.
When you do that, interchangeability becomes impossible. Because nobody else has your life. And when the audience sees your life woven into the fabric of what you do on stage, they are no longer watching a show. They are meeting a person.
That is the difference between a performance they enjoy and a performance they remember.