There is a moment in one of my mentalism routines where something genuinely impossible happens. The spectator has made a completely free choice, and I reveal that I predicted it before the show started. The proof is unambiguous. It is in writing. The audience can see it, read it, verify it. There is no way I could have known, and yet there it is.
This moment, by any honest assessment, is the strongest single beat in my entire show. It is the one that should produce gasps, dropped jaws, the full-body reaction that performers live for.
For the first eighteen months of performing this routine, the reaction was moderate. Pleasant surprise. Appreciation. A few impressed nods. But not the eruption I expected. Not the reaction the effect deserved. I studied the method. Clean. I examined the scripting. Clear. I reviewed the audience management. Solid. Everything was technically right, and the result was underwhelming.
Then I recorded a performance at a private event in Linz and watched it back. And I saw the problem instantly.
The reveal took approximately two and a half seconds. I opened the envelope, showed the prediction, and moved on. Two and a half seconds for the single most impossible moment in the entire show. I blazed through it like it was a formality — a checkbox to tick before the next routine.
The audience had no idea they were supposed to be amazed. Because I was acting like it was nothing.
The Trivial Treatment Disease
This is, I have come to believe, the most common disease in all of magic performance. Not weak technique. Not poor material. Not bad scripts. The disease of treating your best moments as trivial.
It manifests in dozens of ways. The card magician who reveals a selected card with a casual flick and immediately begins shuffling for the next effect. The mentalist who delivers a mind-reading hit and moves to the next phase without letting the hit register. The stage performer who produces a dove and pockets it in the same motion, as if materializing a living creature from nothing is merely a transition between more important things.
In every case, the performer is communicating a clear message: “This is not remarkable. This is routine. This is just what I do.” And the audience, taking their cue from the performer, adjusts their reaction accordingly. If you treat something as trivial, they will experience it as trivial. If you act like producing a dove is unremarkable, they will find it unremarkable.
Darwin Ortiz writes in Strong Magic that the audience’s perception of an effect depends not on the reality of what happened but on the performer’s communication of what happened. This is one of those principles that sounds obvious when you read it and then turns out to be devastatingly non-obvious in practice. Because in practice, the performer is the last person to recognize when they are trivializing their own material.
Why We Do This
I have thought about why this happens, and I think there are at least three reasons, all of which applied to me.
The first is habituation. When you have performed an effect hundreds of times, the miracle is no longer miraculous to you. You know how it works. You know where it is going. You have seen the outcome so many times that the outcome holds no surprise. And because it does not surprise you, your body language, your pacing, and your emotional investment all communicate unsurprise. The audience reads this and calibrates their response to match.
This is a trap that gets worse with experience. The better you get, the more naturally the technique flows, and the more naturally you move through the routine without pausing for the moments that deserve pausing. The smoothness that comes from hundreds of repetitions is, in one sense, the polish you have been working toward. In another sense, it is the erosion of the very investment that made those moments powerful in the first place.
The second reason is nervousness. When I watched that video from the Linz performance, I noticed something else about the reveal: I was rushing. Not because I was in a hurry, but because the reveal was the moment of maximum vulnerability. If the prediction was wrong — if something had gone sideways — this was where it would become apparent. My subconscious had filed the reveal under “get through this quickly” rather than “savor this moment.” I was sprinting through the most powerful beat in the routine because some part of me was anxious about it.
I have since noticed this pattern in other performers too. The moments they rush through are often the moments of highest emotional stakes. The final reveal. The climax. The payoff that everything has been building toward. These are the moments where the performer is most exposed, and exposure triggers speed. We rush through vulnerability. We linger in comfort.
The third reason is a fundamental misunderstanding about where the work is. I had spent so much time and energy on the setup — the scripting, the management of the selection process, the building of anticipation — that by the time the reveal arrived, I was mentally done. The hard work was finished. The method was executed. All that remained was to show the result, which felt like administrative cleanup rather than the dramatic climax of the entire piece.
But the audience’s experience is the exact opposite. For them, the setup was preamble. Interesting, engaging preamble, but preamble. The reveal is the entire point. The reveal is the moment they will describe to someone tomorrow. The reveal is the thing they paid attention to. And I was treating it like the credits after a movie.
The Five-Second Rule
After the Linz wake-up call, I started experimenting with what I now think of as the five-second rule. The rule is simple: any moment of impossibility in my show must last at least five seconds. Not the method. Not the buildup. The moment itself — the beat where the impossible thing is visible, comprehensible, and undeniable to the audience.
Five seconds sounds trivial. It is not. Try it. Perform your strongest reveal and then hold the position for five full seconds without moving, without speaking, without transitioning. Just exist in the aftermath of the impossible thing you just did. Let the audience see it. Let them process it. Let the silence fill the room.
The first time I tried this, it was excruciating. Five seconds of stillness after a reveal felt like an eternity. Every instinct screamed at me to move on, to fill the space, to start the next thing. My body wanted to shift. My mouth wanted to speak. The silence was uncomfortable in a way that surprised me, given that I present to boardrooms for a living and am not generally afraid of pauses.
But the audience reaction was transformative. The same prediction reveal that had been getting moderate appreciation suddenly produced genuine astonishment. People leaned back. People looked at each other. One woman put her hand over her mouth. The reaction was not just stronger — it was qualitatively different. It was the reaction I had always wanted and never received, and the only thing that changed was five seconds of stillness.
What those five seconds did was communicate: this matters. This is not a transition. This is not a formality. This is the most remarkable thing that has happened in this room tonight, and we are all going to sit with it for a moment before anything else happens.
What Weber Calls “Capturing the Excitement”
This is the essence of Weber’s third pillar: show the audience why what you are doing is special. Do not assume they know. Do not assume the impossibility speaks for itself. It does not. You must communicate the significance of each moment through your own investment in it.
The performer is the audience’s guide. They do not know what is difficult and what is easy. They do not know what is impossible and what is routine. They cannot tell the difference between a moment that required years of practice and a moment that any beginner could achieve. All they have to go on is you — your face, your body language, your pacing, your emotional investment.
When you rush through a reveal, you are telling the audience: “This was easy. This was expected. This is not where the important thing happens.” When you pause, hold the moment, let the impossibility sit in the air, you are telling the audience: “This is the moment. This is it. This is why you came.”
The audience is not wrong when they give a muted reaction to a rushed reveal. They are reading your cues accurately. You told them it was not important. They believed you.
The Upstream Problem
Once I understood the trivial treatment disease, I started seeing it not just in individual reveals but in the entire architecture of my routines. The problem was not just that I was rushing the climax. The problem was that I was not building toward the climax with enough investment along the way.
A reveal gains its power from everything that precedes it. If the setup is casual, the reveal will feel casual regardless of how long you pause. But if the setup communicates increasing stakes, increasing investment, increasing importance — if every step along the way says “we are building toward something that matters” — then the reveal arrives with the full weight of accumulated anticipation behind it.
I restructured my prediction routine. I slowed down the entire sequence, not just the reveal. I added beats of genuine concern — “I wrote this prediction before the show, and I have no idea whether it is right.” I let the audience see me weighing the envelope before opening it. I created a moment of doubt — real doubt, or at least the performance of doubt — just before the reveal. All of this was upstream investment in the moment that mattered.
The reveal went from two and a half seconds to about twelve. The buildup went from ninety seconds to nearly three minutes. The total routine was now twice as long. And the reaction was five times as strong.
The Mirror Test
Here is a diagnostic test I now apply to every routine. I call it the mirror test, and it is brutal.
Record your performance. Watch the moment of impossibility — the climax, the reveal, the payoff. Now ask yourself: if I were watching this for the first time, with no knowledge of magic, would I know that something remarkable just happened?
Not “Would I know that a trick was performed?” That is a lower bar. The question is: would I feel the remarkableness of the moment? Would the performer’s behavior communicate that this is extraordinary?
When I applied the mirror test to my recordings, the results were devastating. In routine after routine, the climactic moment was buried — lost in a flow of continuous movement and speech that gave the audience no signal to stop and be amazed. The moments I had worked hardest to create, the effects I was most proud of, were passing by so quickly that an uninformed viewer might not even identify them as the high points.
The mirror test revealed a systematic problem. I was performing my routines from the inside out — from my experience of the routine — rather than from the outside in — from the audience’s experience. And from the inside, the reveal is the end of a process. But from the outside, the reveal is the entire point.
What I Do Now
My current approach to every routine includes a deliberate audit of the high points. I identify the one or two moments that are genuinely impossible from the audience’s perspective — not technically demanding from my perspective, but perceptually impossible from theirs — and then I build the entire routine around giving those moments maximum weight.
This means: pause before. Pause after. Change my tone of voice. Change my body position. Create a visible shift in energy that signals to the audience: something different is about to happen.
It means: let the reaction develop. Do not step on it. Do not start the next thing while the audience is still processing the current thing. Give them the time their brains need to register impossibility, share a look with someone nearby, and return to you ready for whatever comes next.
It means: treat these moments as if I have never seen them before. Not with fake surprise — audiences can smell fake surprise from the back row. With genuine investment. With the focus and attention of someone who cares deeply about what is happening in front of them. Because I do care. I just had to stop hiding that behind a veneer of smooth professionalism.
At a keynote I gave in Vienna a few weeks ago, I performed my prediction routine with the full five-second pause, the upstream investment, the deliberate weight on the climactic moment. When I opened the envelope and showed the prediction, the room went silent. Not polite silence. Stunned silence. The kind of silence that precedes genuine astonishment. And when I let that silence hold — five seconds, maybe six — the reaction that followed was the strongest I have ever received.
Same effect. Same method. Same words, mostly. The only difference was that I stopped treating my best moment as trivial.
It turns out that the audience was always ready to be amazed. I just had to stop telling them not to be.