There is a line from Ken Weber that I keep returning to, one that I have written on a card and taped to the mirror in my office: “A blur of great magic is still a blur.”
I think about that line every time I catch myself speeding up during a performance. Every time I feel the internal pressure to move faster, to get to the next moment, to keep the energy high by keeping the pace high. Because for a long time, that is exactly what I believed. Fast meant exciting. Momentum meant engagement. A show that moved quickly was a show that never lost the audience.
I was wrong about all of it.
The Speed Trap
The first time I understood what speed was costing me was, predictably, on video. I had recorded a set at a private event in Linz — a good show, well-received, nothing went wrong. When I watched the recording, the performance looked competent and polished. And it also looked like it was being played at 1.25x speed.
I was racing. Not in a way that felt rushed from the inside — from the inside, I felt dynamic and energetic. But from the outside, I was a blur of words and actions that gave the audience almost no time to process what they were seeing.
The problem was most visible at the moments that should have been strongest. The reveals. The climaxes. The instants where the impossible thing happens and the audience is supposed to feel it. At those moments, I was already moving to the next beat before the current one had landed. I would execute a reveal and immediately begin speaking the transition to the next segment, as if the reveal was a formality I needed to get past rather than the entire point of the routine.
Watching the video, I could see the audience trying to react and being denied the space to do so. A woman in the front row would begin to gasp, and by the time her gasp completed, I was three sentences into the next routine. A couple on the right side would turn to each other — that beautiful moment when people share their astonishment — and by the time they turned back, I was already somewhere else.
I was stealing my own best moments.
Why We Speed Up
The instinct to go fast comes from several places, and understanding them helped me fight the habit.
The first is fear. Silence feels dangerous. Dead air feels like losing the audience. When you are standing in front of a hundred people and there is a moment of quiet, every instinct screams: fill it. Say something. Do something. Keep the machine running. The performer who has not trained himself to tolerate silence will fill every gap with words and motion, and the result is a performance that never breathes.
The second is adrenaline. Live performance is a physiological event. Your heart rate is elevated. Your nervous system is activated. Everything inside you is running faster than normal, which means your internal sense of time is distorted. A three-second pause that would feel comfortable in a rehearsal room feels like an eternity on stage. So you cut it short. You move on. You mistake your own discomfort for the audience’s boredom.
The third is a misunderstanding of what entertainment is. Somewhere along the way, many of us absorb the idea that entertainment means constant stimulation. That the audience needs to be perpetually engaged, perpetually receiving new information, perpetually in motion. This is the Netflix model of entertainment — if there is a lull, they will change the channel.
But live performance is not Netflix. The audience is not holding a remote. They are committed to being in the room, and they want the experience to unfold at a pace that allows them to feel it. They do not want a fire hose. They want a story.
Fitzkee’s Three Faults
Dariel Fitzkee identified three categories of fault that destroy entertainment value, and the first two are directly relevant here. The first fault is delays and fumblings — dead time, uncertainty, searching for props. The second is excess movements or lines — anything that does not advance the act toward its climax. And the third is blind by-paths, tangents that break forward momentum.
What is interesting is that speed violations can fall into the second category. It seems counterintuitive — how can going fast be an excess? — but speed often creates excess by making moments meaningless. When you rush through a reveal, that reveal occupies time without delivering impact. It is a moment that exists in the timeline of the show but does not register in the experience of the audience. That is excess. That is a wasted moment. It would have been more powerful at half the speed, because at half the speed, it would have actually been felt.
Fitzkee’s golden rule of showmanship captures this perfectly: “Not too much; but just a bit too little.” The goal is not to give the audience everything. It is to give them slightly less than everything, so they are left wanting more. Speed violates this rule catastrophically. Speed gives the audience too much, too fast, creating the paradoxical sensation of being overfed and still hungry. Too much information, too little time to digest any of it.
The Moments That Are Necessary
The title of this post comes from a principle I extracted from studying several different sources, but the clearest articulation comes from the world of stand-up comedy. Ralphie May, in a masterclass I came across while studying comedy performance, talks about tightening material by removing every unnecessary word. Young performers, he says, are “too verbose” — they use too many words to get to the point.
The magic performance equivalent is not just unnecessary words but unnecessary moments. Every transition that could be tighter. Every preamble that could be shorter. Every piece of setup that goes on two sentences too long. Every recovery between routines that includes a few seconds of visible thinking.
But — and this is the critical distinction — tightening does not mean speeding up. It means removing the unnecessary so that the necessary can be played at the right pace. Less material, more space. Fewer words, longer pauses. A shorter show that hits harder because every moment in it has room to land.
Think of it like editing a piece of writing. A good editor does not make a manuscript faster by shrinking the font. A good editor removes the sentences that are not doing work, so that the remaining sentences have the space and emphasis they deserve. The result is a shorter text that feels more substantial, not less.
Performance editing works the same way. You identify the moments that are necessary — the reveals, the connections with the audience, the emotional beats, the climaxes — and you cut or compress everything that is not serving those moments. Then you play the necessary moments at the pace they deserve, which is almost always slower than your instinct suggests.
The Corporate Keynote Lesson
I learned this principle from a completely unexpected source: a keynote speaker at a corporate innovation conference in Graz. This was years ago, before I was performing magic, back when I was purely a strategy consultant. The speaker was talking about product design, and he said something that stuck: “The best products do fewer things, better. The impulse to add features is the enemy of the impulse to perfect features.”
That sentence has haunted me through my entire magic journey. Because the same impulse exists in performance. The impulse to add another routine, another moment, another flourish, another line. The feeling that more content equals more value. The anxiety that if you slow down, you will not fill the time.
But filling time is not the goal. Impact is the goal. And impact requires space. A powerful moment that is given two seconds to land will register as a nice moment. The same moment given five seconds to land will register as a memorable moment. The same moment given eight seconds to land — with silence, with eye contact, with the performer standing still and letting the audience feel what just happened — will register as an extraordinary moment.
The difference between those three scenarios is not the moment itself. It is the pace around the moment. It is the willingness to play only what is necessary and to play it at the speed it deserves.
What Slowing Down Actually Looks Like
When I first tried to slow my performance pace, I overcorrected. I became ponderous. Deliberate to the point of self-consciousness. I was so focused on not rushing that I lost the natural energy that makes a performance feel alive.
The solution, which took me several months to find, was not to slow everything down uniformly. It was to identify the moments that needed space and give them space, while keeping the connective tissue at a natural, conversational pace.
The rhythm of a good performance, I have come to believe, is more like music than like speech. There are fast passages and slow passages. There are moments of build where the pace accelerates, and moments of release where it pulls back. The climax of a routine should be preceded by a gradual deceleration, not an acceleration — you slow down as you approach the moment of maximum impact, so the audience feels the weight of what is about to happen.
This is exactly what Fitzkee describes in his writing on timing: gradually slow your tempo as you approach the climax. Pause after each important phrase. Pause almost twice as long just before the phrase establishing a point. The overall effect is a deceleration that builds anticipation and concentrates attention.
When I started applying this — slowing down at the moments that mattered most, allowing natural pace in the connecting sections — the performances began to feel different. Not just from the outside, on video, but from the inside. I could feel the audience’s attention sharpen during the decelerations. I could feel the pauses filling with anticipation rather than emptiness. I could feel the reveals landing with the weight they deserved.
The Economy of Necessary Moments
Here is the exercise I now use when evaluating any routine, taken directly from my video review process.
I watch a recording of a routine and I mark every moment that produces one of the three reactions Weber identifies: rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment. Then I look at everything between those moments. The spaces between the reactions. The connective tissue. The setup, the preamble, the transitions.
Some of that connective tissue is necessary — it builds context, establishes conditions, creates the framework for the next reaction. Some of it is not. Some of it is verbal filler, physical habit, unnecessary repetition, or over-explanation. The unnecessary material gets cut. The necessary material gets examined for pace — am I playing it at the speed it deserves, or am I rushing it?
The result, over time, is a routine that has been compressed and decelerated simultaneously. Compressed because the unnecessary material has been removed. Decelerated because the remaining material is played at a pace that allows it to register fully with the audience.
Less material. More space. Stronger impact. This is the economy of necessary moments, and it is the heart of what Weber means by eliminating weak spots.
The Speed Audit
If you perform and you have never recorded yourself, I will make you a prediction: you are faster than you think. Almost every performer I have ever discussed this with discovers the same thing. The internal experience of pace is consistently faster than the external reality of pace, but even the external reality is usually too fast for the audience.
Record yourself. Watch at the moments where the audience should be reacting. Are you giving them time? Are you still talking when they should be processing? Are you already moving to the next thing when the current thing has not fully landed?
If the answer is yes, you have found one of the most impactful improvements available to you. It costs nothing. It requires no new material, no new technique, no new props. It requires only the willingness to slow down, to trust the silence, and to let the moments you have worked so hard to create actually be experienced by the people you created them for.
Speed kills. Not the audience — the audience can follow you at any pace. Speed kills the impact. It kills the magic. It kills the space between intention and experience where all the real power lives.
Play only the moments that are necessary. And play them at the pace they deserve.