Here is how a strategy consultant thinks about presentations: lead with your strongest insight. If the partners are going to check their phones after ninety seconds, make the first ninety seconds count. Front-load your best material. Establish authority immediately. Do not save the good stuff for later because there might not be a later.
Here is how a magician thinks about shows: save your strongest piece for last. Close with your best material. Build toward the peak. The audience is going to be there for the whole thing, so design the experience to crescendo.
These two philosophies are not contradictory. They are complementary. And the point where they meet is one of the most important structural principles in performance: your second-strongest piece opens the show, and your strongest piece closes it.
I first encountered this framework in Scott Alexander’s lecture notes on building a stand-up act. His sequencing rule is elegantly simple. Your opener needs to be strong — strong enough to establish credibility, capture attention, and tell the audience that they are in good hands. But it should not be your strongest piece, because if you peak in the first two minutes, everything that follows is a slow decline.
Your closer, by contrast, must be your absolute best. The last thing the audience experiences is the thing they carry with them. It is the exclamation point on the entire evening. If the closer is weaker than what came before it, the show deflates at the very moment it should be exploding.
The logic is sound. The execution is harder than it sounds. Because before you can put your second-strongest at the top and your strongest at the bottom, you need to know which is which. And I discovered, through a very illuminating exercise in a hotel room in Vienna, that my intuitions about my own material were wildly wrong.
The Index Card Exercise
I got this idea from a combination of sources — the sequencing principles I had been studying, plus my consulting habit of mapping arguments on sticky notes before building a presentation deck. One evening after a show, sitting at the desk in my hotel room with a glass of water and a stack of blank index cards, I decided to audit my entire repertoire.
I wrote each piece on its own card. Not just the name, but the details: approximate length, emotional register, audience interaction type, prop requirements, and — this was the crucial part — a rating from one to ten for audience impact. Not how much I enjoyed performing it. Not how technically impressive it was. How hard it hit the audience, based on the dozens of times I had performed each piece.
I had eleven pieces to rate. Eleven cards spread across the desk.
The first surprise was that my ratings did not match my expectations. The piece I thought was my strongest — a mentalism effect that I considered my signature — came in at a seven. A seven. It was impressive, certainly. The audience always reacted. But when I was honest with myself, when I really thought about the quality and intensity of the reactions across multiple performances, it was not my strongest. It was my most technically demanding. It was the piece I was proudest of as a practitioner. But pride of craftsmanship is not the same as audience impact.
My actual strongest piece — the one that consistently produced the most intense reactions, the genuine gasps, the moments where people turned to each other in disbelief — was a piece I had been burying in the middle of my set. It was not my most technically complex effect. It was not the one I had spent the most hours practicing. But something about it — the combination of the premise, the audience involvement, the visual clarity of the impossible moment — landed harder than anything else in my repertoire.
My second-strongest piece was another surprise. It was an opener I had been using inconsistently — sometimes leading with it, sometimes saving it for later. It was fast, visual, and immediately engaging. It did not require context or setup. It worked on pure spectacle and established my credibility within sixty seconds.
When I laid the cards out in the order that the sequencing principle demanded — second-strongest first, strongest last, everything else building from good to better in between — I was looking at a set I had never performed. Not because the pieces were new, but because the arrangement was new. It was like discovering that you have been reading a book with the chapters in the wrong order.
The Opener’s Job
The opener has a specific and limited job, and understanding that job is what made the sequencing principle click for me.
The opener’s job is not to be the best moment of the show. The opener’s job is to answer a question that every audience is asking, consciously or not, in the first sixty seconds: is this person worth my attention?
That question has nothing to do with peaking the audience’s emotional experience. It has everything to do with establishing trust, competence, and engagement. The opener says: I know what I am doing. I am going to be entertaining. You can relax, settle in, and trust that the next thirty minutes will be worth your time.
A strong opener accomplishes this. A good opener accomplishes this. Your absolute strongest piece accomplishes this but at a catastrophic cost — because now you have spent your best ammunition on the question of whether you are competent, and you have nothing bigger left for the question of whether you are extraordinary.
The second-strongest piece is the sweet spot. It is strong enough to establish credibility instantly. It is impressive enough to engage even a skeptical audience. But it is not your best. It leaves room above it. It creates the sense that what the audience has just seen is excellent, and the implicit promise that it will get even better. That implicit promise — the feeling that there is more to come, that the show has not peaked, that the best is still ahead — is the engine that drives engagement for the next twenty-five minutes.
The Middle: Workhorses, Not Climbers
If the opener is your second-strongest and the closer is your strongest, then the middle of the show is populated by what I think of as workhorses. These are your solid, reliable, engaging pieces. They are not trying to be the climax. They are not competing for the peak. They are doing the essential work of maintaining engagement, varying texture, deepening the relationship with the audience, and building the emotional arc that will make the closer devastating.
Workhorses are not weak pieces. A weak piece has no place in any part of the set — as I explored in the earlier posts about eliminating weak spots. Workhorses are strong. They are just not your strongest. They are the chapters of the novel that advance the plot, develop the characters, and create the context that makes the final chapter meaningful.
The sequencing within the middle matters too. I arrange my workhorses in ascending order of impact — the weakest of the middle pieces goes immediately after the opener, and the strongest of the middle pieces goes immediately before the closer. This creates a gentle upward slope from good to better that the audience feels as forward momentum even if they cannot articulate it.
The middle is also where I put my highest-variety pieces. If the opener is visual and fast, the first middle piece might be conversational and slow. If the second middle piece is comedic, the third might be dramatic. The variety prevents the audience from habituating to any single mode of engagement, which keeps their attention fresh for the closer.
The Closer’s Job
The closer’s job is the opposite of the opener’s. The opener answers: is this person competent? The closer answers: was this experience extraordinary?
The closer is where you spend everything. The strongest effect. The deepest emotional resonance. The biggest visual impact. The most impossible moment. Everything the show has built toward resolves here. The through-line reaches its conclusion. The callbacks pay off. The ascending energy reaches its apex.
I used to think of the closer as just the last trick. The one that happens to be at the end. Now I think of it as the destination. The entire show is a journey to this moment. Every piece before it — the opener, the workhorses, the transitions, the rest periods — exists to make this moment as powerful as possible.
This is why the closer must be your strongest piece. Not your most technically impressive. Not the one you are proudest of. The one that hits the audience hardest. The one that produces the quality of silence I described in an earlier post — the thick, weighted silence of people who have been stunned into stillness. That is your closer. Everything else leads to it.
The Consulting Parallel
I cannot help but see the parallel to the presentation structures I have been building for years in my consulting work.
A strong strategy presentation opens with a hook — a surprising statistic, a provocative question, a brief story that captures the essential tension. This is the second-strongest moment of the presentation. It establishes credibility and engagement. It says: pay attention, this is going to be worth your time.
The middle of the presentation delivers the analysis — the data, the frameworks, the insights that build the argument. These are the workhorses. They are essential. They are solid. They are not trying to be the most exciting moments of the presentation. They are trying to be the most convincing.
And the close — the final recommendation, the vision of the future, the call to action — is the strongest moment. It is where everything converges. It is the slide that makes the partners lean forward. It is the moment where the entire preceding analysis crystallizes into a single, compelling conclusion.
Second-strongest opens. Strongest closes. Workhorses in the middle. The architecture is identical whether you are presenting a market entry strategy to a board of directors or performing a thirty-minute magic show at a corporate event in Graz. The human psychology is the same. The structural principles are the same. The only difference is the medium.
What I Learned from the Ratings
Going back to that index card exercise — the one where I rated every piece on audience impact — I want to share something I did not expect.
When I finished rating and sequencing, I noticed that my previous set order correlated almost perfectly with my technical pride rather than audience impact. I had been ordering my set based on how impressive the effects were to me as a practitioner, not how impressive they were to the people watching. The pieces I considered most sophisticated — the ones that used the most demanding technique, the ones that would impress other performers — were in my prime positions. The pieces that consistently produced the strongest audience reactions were buried in the middle, treated as filler between the “real” effects.
This is, I think, a common mistake among performers who are serious students of their craft. We confuse technical difficulty with audience impact. We assume that the hardest thing to do is the most impressive thing to watch. But audiences do not know what is hard. They do not grade on technical difficulty. They react to clarity, to impossibility, to emotional resonance. A technically simple effect with a crystal-clear impossible moment will outperform a technically demanding effect with a muddy reveal every single time.
The index card exercise forced me to confront this. It forced me to separate my pride from my programming. And when I arranged the cards based on audience impact rather than technical sophistication, I was looking at a set that felt wrong to my performer instincts and right to my audience analysis.
I performed the new sequence at a corporate event the following week. The difference was immediate and unmistakable. The opener grabbed the room. The middle held the room. The closer devastated the room. The arc was clean, ascending, and inevitable. And the audience’s final experience — the thing they took home, the thing they told their colleagues about the next day — was the strongest possible moment I could have given them.
The Practical Takeaway
If you take one thing from this post, let it be the index card exercise. Get a stack of cards. Write every piece in your repertoire on its own card. Rate each one on audience impact — not your enjoyment, not your technical pride, not what other performers think. Audience impact. What makes them react the hardest? What produces the silence, the gasp, the spontaneous applause?
Then arrange the cards. Second-strongest at the top. Strongest at the bottom. Everything else ascending in between.
Look at the sequence. Compare it to your current set order. I would be surprised if they match. I would be surprised if you do not see, immediately, the structural mistakes you have been making.
Then perform the new sequence. Just once. See what happens.
What happened for me was that the show stopped being a collection of effects arranged by my preferences and became a designed experience arranged by the audience’s needs. And the audience’s needs are simple: start strong, build from there, and end with the most powerful moment you have.
Second-strongest opens. Strongest closes. Everything between is a bridge from one to the other.
It is not complicated. But it changes everything.