The opener has landed. The audience is paying attention. They know you can do something they cannot explain. They have decided, in those first three seconds and the two minutes that followed, that you are credible. That their time is in good hands.
Now what?
My answer, for an embarrassingly long time, was: more magic. Hit them again. Strike while the iron is hot. Show them another impossibility before the momentum fades.
I was wrong. The audience does not need more impossibility after the opener. They need something entirely different. They need to meet you.
The Missing Piece
Scott Alexander calls it the personality piece, and the name is precise. It is a section of the show — typically four to five minutes — where the audience discovers who you are as a person. Not what you can do. Who you are.
The distinction matters enormously, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp it.
When Alexander writes that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it,” he is making a claim that seems heretical to a magician. We spend hundreds of hours mastering our craft. And then someone tells us that none of that matters as much as whether the audience likes us?
But he is right. A liked performer who makes a mistake gets forgiveness and laughter. An unliked performer who executes perfectly gets polite applause and indifference. Liking is not a bonus — it is the medium through which everything else is transmitted. The personality piece is where liking is established.
My First Attempt Was Terrible
Let me tell you about my first personality piece, because it illustrates a mistake I suspect many performers make.
I understood the concept. I agreed with the logic. I knew I needed a section where the audience got to know me. So I wrote one. I scripted a four-minute talking routine built around a simple effect, and I peppered it with jokes, self-deprecating humor, and what I thought were charming observations about life as a consultant who does magic on the side.
The problem was that the person in that script was not me. It was a character I had unconsciously constructed — a version of myself that I thought audiences would like. This character was smoother than I am. More confident. More witty. He had a polished, television-host energy that I had absorbed from watching too many performers on YouTube and unconsciously decided was what “entertaining” looked like.
The first time I performed this personality piece, at a small private event in Innsbruck, something felt off. The audience smiled. They laughed at the jokes. They were perfectly pleasant. But there was a distance between us that I could not close. They were watching a performance, not meeting a person. And the rest of the show suffered for it — not dramatically, but in a subtle, pervasive way. The warmth was missing. The connection was polite rather than genuine.
Afterward, I asked a friend who had been in the audience for honest feedback. She thought about it for a long time and then said something that stung: “You were charming, but I could not tell what was really you and what was an act.”
She was right. The whole thing was an act. I had written a personality piece that showcased a personality that was not mine.
Who Are You on Stage?
This question — who are you on stage? — is the hardest question in performance. It is less a question and more a lifelong negotiation between who you are, who you think the audience wants you to be, and who you discover yourself becoming when the lights go on.
The shift came, of all places, during a keynote I was giving in Vienna. Not a magic show — a consulting keynote. I was telling a story about a project that had gone badly wrong. A real story about a client who had committed to a transformation strategy and then lost their nerve halfway through. The project stalled, the team fractured, and I had to stand in a boardroom and explain why the ambitious plan I had recommended was now dead in the water.
It was a story about failure. My failure, at least in part. And as I told it — the real version, not the polished version — I noticed the audience leaning in. Not because the story was dramatic. Because it was honest.
After that keynote, someone said: “I have heard a lot of innovation talks. Yours was the first one where I felt like the speaker was actually a real person.”
That comment echoed my friend’s feedback about the personality piece. The audience can always tell the difference between a performance of personality and the real thing.
The Rewrite
I rewrote my personality piece from scratch. This time, I did not start with “What would be entertaining?” I started with “What is actually true about me?”
What is actually true is that I am a strategy consultant who stumbled into magic because he could not bring a guitar into a hotel room. What is actually true is that my first impression of magic was negative — a childhood encounter with a clown performer that left me thinking magic was for kids. What is actually true is that I went down the rabbit hole as an adult, alone in hotel rooms, learning from online tutorials and wondering what exactly I was doing with my life.
These are not glamorous origin stories. They are not the kind of thing I imagined a personality piece would contain. But they are real, and real, it turns out, is what the audience is hungry for.
I built the new personality piece around a simple story: the first time I tried to show a card trick to my colleagues at a dinner after a consulting workshop. The nervousness. The fumble. The moment when one of them — a woman I deeply respected professionally — leaned in and said, genuinely, “Wait, do that again.” And the realization that magic was not for kids. It was for anyone willing to be surprised.
The effect woven through this story is modest. It is not my strongest material. It does not need to be. The effect is there to give my hands something to do while the audience discovers who I am. It is the background music to the conversation, not the main event.
What Happens During the Personality Piece
When the personality piece works, something shifts in the room. The audience’s posture changes. They relax. They stop evaluating and start relating. They see themselves in the story — not because they are magicians, but because they have all had the experience of discovering something unexpected about themselves, of being nervous about revealing a hidden passion, of being surprised by what lights them up.
The personality piece is where the audience decides whether they like you. Not whether they respect you — the opener handled that. Whether they like you. Whether they want to spend the next twenty minutes in your company. Whether they are rooting for you.
And here is the thing Alexander’s framework makes explicit: the rest of the show depends on this decision. If the audience likes you, the middle section — with its audience participation and its call for volunteers — works effortlessly. People volunteer because they want to be part of the show. They want to interact with someone they like.
If the audience does not like you — if the personality piece failed to connect, or if it was missing entirely — the middle section becomes a struggle. Volunteers are reluctant. Participation feels forced. The energy sags.
The personality piece is the hinge on which the entire show turns.
Scouting from the Stage
There is a practical function of the personality piece that Alexander mentions and that I have come to rely on heavily: it is your scouting opportunity.
During the opener, you are focused on execution. You are delivering a fast, visual, high-energy piece, and your attention is on timing and precision. You do not have bandwidth to read individual audience members.
During the personality piece, you do. You are talking. You are telling a story. The effect is simple and well-rehearsed. This frees your attention to scan the room. Who is laughing? Who is leaning in? Who has open body language? Who is making eye contact? Who seems like they would be a willing, energetic, fun participant in the next section?
I use the personality piece to identify my volunteers for the middle section. Not obviously — I do not stare at anyone or point them out. But I notice the woman in the third row who laughed the hardest at my self-deprecating joke. I notice the man at the table by the window who has been nudging his partner and pointing at the stage. I notice the couple in the front who are both leaning forward with open, receptive body language.
By the time I transition from the personality piece into the middle section and need my first volunteer, I already know who I am going to approach. This eliminates the awkward “Who wants to help me?” moment that kills momentum. Instead, I can walk directly to someone I have already identified as willing and engage them naturally, as if the choice were spontaneous.
It is not spontaneous. It is prepared. But it looks spontaneous, and that is what matters.
Knowing Who You Are Means Knowing What Material You Should Be Doing
Alexander says something else that I want to sit with, because it connects the personality piece to something much larger.
Knowing who you are on stage means knowing what material you should be doing.
This is not just about the personality piece. It is about the entire show. If you know that your stage personality is warm, self-deprecating, analytical — which is what I have discovered mine to be — then you know that your material should support that personality. Effects that require bravado do not fit. Effects that require a mysterious, distant demeanor do not fit. Effects that require aggression or confrontation do not fit. Not because those effects are bad, but because they belong to a different performer, one whose personality piece establishes a different character.
Once I understood this, I stopped trying to perform everything and started performing the things that fit. I let go of effects I had spent months practicing because they did not match who I am on stage. I developed new material specifically because it supported my personality. The show became more consistent, more authentic, more me.
And the audience could tell. They always can.
The Transition
The personality piece ends with a natural transition into the middle section. This transition is not a break — it is a pivot. The audience has met me. They like me (if I have done my job). They are relaxed, engaged, and receptive. Now the show can deepen.
The transition I use is simple: the story I am telling during the personality piece naturally leads to an invitation. The audience moves from listening to participating. From observers to collaborators. And because they have spent the last four minutes getting to know me, the invitation feels natural rather than imposed.
“You run a magic company, you need to be able to perform.” That was the sentence that pushed me to build my first show. But I could perform effects long before I could connect with an audience. The personality piece is where I learned to connect. Where I stopped being a trick delivery system and started being a person who happens to do impossible things.
The effects are the reason the audience was booked. The personality is the reason they remember the evening.
And the personality piece — those four minutes of honest, simple, human storytelling — is where the second most important transaction of the show takes place. The first transaction is credibility, handled by the opener. The second is liking. And liking, as it turns out, is the foundation everything else is built on.
Alexander was right. It does not matter what you do, as long as they like you while you are doing it. The personality piece is where the liking begins.