I am going to tell you about the worst moment of my performing life. Not because I enjoy revisiting it, but because the lesson it taught me is too important to protect my ego.
It was a corporate event in Salzburg. About seventy people. The show had been going well — strong opener, engaged audience, good participation in the middle section, building momentum toward the closer. Everything was tracking the way a well-structured show should track. The energy was rising. The audience was leaning forward. The mountaintop was in sight.
My closer at the time was a technically ambitious piece. It was visually striking and, when it worked, produced the kind of reaction that justified every hour I had spent rehearsing it. But it had a dependency I had not fully reckoned with. The effect required specific environmental conditions to land perfectly. I am not going to describe what those conditions were — that would cross the line into method territory. But imagine a piece that works flawlessly in ninety-five percent of venues and fails completely in five percent, and you will understand the problem.
That night in Salzburg was the five percent.
I do not know exactly what was different about the room. The lighting, the temperature, the humidity, the specific arrangement of the space — something was off, and I did not realize it until I was already in the effect. Already committed. Already past the point of no return.
The final moment arrived. The moment the entire show had been building toward. The audience was primed. The silence was electric. Everything had been structured to converge on this single point of maximum impact.
And the effect did not work.
Not a graceful partial failure. Not a minor glitch that I could cover with misdirection or patter. A visible, unambiguous failure. The thing that was supposed to happen did not happen, and the audience could see that it did not happen, and everyone in the room — myself included — experienced the specific, stomach-dropping sensation of watching a climax collapse.
There was a pause. Not the dramatic, productive pause I have written about in earlier posts. A dead pause. The kind of silence that contains not anticipation but confusion. The audience looked at me. I looked at the audience. And in that moment, the entire show — all twenty-five minutes of carefully constructed, steadily ascending, emotionally calibrated performance — evaporated. The only thing that remained in the audience’s memory was the thing that had just gone wrong.
I said something. I do not remember what. Something that attempted to acknowledge the moment with humor, to transform the failure into a human beat. It partially worked — there was some laughter, some sympathy, some of the gracious energy that Austrian audiences tend to offer a performer who is clearly struggling. But the damage was done. The show ended not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with an apology.
The Hotel Room After
I sat in my hotel room that night for a long time. This is a pattern with me — the hotel room debrief, alone, replaying the evening in my head with the brutal clarity that only retrospect provides. But this debrief was different. This was not about adjusting a timing issue or refining a transition. This was about reckoning with a fundamental mistake in my show construction.
The mistake was not the failed effect. Effects fail. Methods have limitations. Environmental variables are, by definition, variable. This is the reality of live performance, and any performer who tells you they have never had an effect fail is either lying or has not performed enough.
The mistake was choosing a closer that could fail. The mistake was placing the single most important moment in my entire show — the mountaintop, the moment Weber says you can only reach once — on a foundation that depended on factors I could not control.
I had built the entire show to converge on one point. And that point was not reliable. The closer was a house built on sand, and when the sand shifted, the house came down, and it took the rest of the show with it.
The Bulletproof Closer Principle
In the days that followed, I thought about what I would have done differently. And I kept arriving at the same answer, from every angle I examined the problem.
The closer must be bulletproof.
Not almost bulletproof. Not bulletproof in most venues. Not bulletproof when the conditions are right. Bulletproof. Period. No exceptions. No dependencies. No environmental variables. No “it usually works.”
I thought about the math. If a closer has a five percent failure rate, and you perform forty times a year, that closer will fail twice a year. Two shows where your ending collapses. Two audiences who walk out with a memory of a failure instead of a mountaintop. Two events where the organizer’s lasting impression is not the twenty-five minutes that went brilliantly but the three minutes that went wrong.
Five percent sounds like an acceptable risk until you do the math. Until you experience what a failed closer feels like — not just for you, but for the audience. The audience did not invest twenty-five minutes of attention in order to arrive at a technical malfunction. They invested that attention because the show promised them a destination, and the failed closer broke that promise in the most visible possible way.
The recency effect makes this even more devastating than it already sounds. I wrote about this in the previous post: people remember the last thing most vividly. A failed closer does not just ruin the ending. It retroactively taints the entire show. The audience’s memory of the strong middle section, the warm personality piece, the impressive opener — all of it gets colored by the feeling of the failed ending. The show becomes “the one where the last trick didn’t work.”
What Changed
I rebuilt my closer from the ground up. And the design principle I used was not “what produces the strongest reaction?” but “what produces the strongest reliable reaction?”
Reliable. That was the new criterion. The closer had to work every time. In every venue. Under every condition. With every audience. In bright light and dim light. In low humidity and high humidity. In intimate rooms and cavernous halls. On stages and on floors. With music and without. With perfect setup time and with rushed setup time.
This constraint — this demand for absolute reliability — forced me to rethink what “strongest” meant. My old closer was strong in theory and fragile in practice. The strongest possible closer, I realized, is one that combines maximum impact with zero vulnerability. Not a compromise between the two, where you sacrifice some impact for some reliability. A design where the reliability enables the impact rather than constraining it.
The closer I eventually developed is simpler in its method than my original one. Substantially simpler. When I was building it, I felt the pull of the ego — the voice that said “simpler means weaker” and “you are taking a step backward.” That voice was wrong, but it was loud, and it took conscious effort to override it.
What the new closer lacks in technical complexity, it gains in something far more valuable: presence. Because the method requires minimal conscious attention, my mind is free during the closer. Free to be with the audience. Free to modulate my voice, my timing, my eye contact. Free to feel the room and respond to its energy. Free to be a person sharing a moment rather than a technician managing a procedure.
The old closer demanded my attention. The new closer demands only my presence.
The Three Tests
After rebuilding the closer, I developed three tests that I now apply to any piece I consider for the closing position.
The first test is the rehearsal count. If a piece requires more than three rehearsals to feel completely automatic — if I have to think about any element of the method during performance — it is too complex for a closer. The closer should be the piece I could perform after being woken up at three in the morning, groggy and disoriented, and still execute flawlessly. Not because closers should be easy, but because the mental bandwidth they free up is what allows the performance to be extraordinary.
The second test is the environment test. I mentally walk through every venue I have performed in, every condition I have encountered, and I ask: would this closer work there? Would it work in the dimly lit restaurant where the tables are too close together? Would it work on the raised stage with the blinding spotlights? Would it work in the outdoor tent where the wind comes through the sides? If the answer is not “yes, absolutely, every time,” the piece is not reliable enough for the closing position.
The third test is the emotional test. Does this piece move people, or does it merely impress them? If the answer is “impress,” it belongs in the middle of the set, where technical impressiveness serves the build. The closer needs to move. It needs to create a feeling that outlasts the moment. Amazement fades. Emotion lingers.
A piece that passes all three tests — automatically executable, environmentally independent, emotionally resonant — is a closer. Everything else, no matter how spectacular, belongs somewhere else in the show.
What the Audience Sees Now
My current closer looks nothing like my old one. The old closer was an event — a dramatic, visually complex sequence that demanded the audience’s analytical attention. It was designed to make them think: That is impossible.
The new closer is an experience. It is quieter. More personal. It involves a revelation that connects the performer to the audience in a way that feels specific and real. The impossibility is present — this is still magic — but it is wrapped in something human. The audience does not just think “that is impossible.” They feel something. A recognition. A connection. A moment of genuine wonder that has warmth in it.
The visual image of the closer is clean and simple. One object. One transformation. One moment of recognition. The audience can describe it in a single sentence to someone who was not there, and that sentence carries the feeling with it. This is the visual clarity I wrote about in the previous post, and it is not accidental. It is designed. A closer that cannot be described is a closer that cannot be remembered, and a closer that cannot be remembered has failed at its most basic function.
The Deeper Lesson
The Salzburg failure taught me something that extends far beyond show construction. It taught me about the relationship between ambition and reliability.
In my consulting work, in my startup life, in every professional context I have operated in, I have seen the same pattern. People choose the ambitious option over the reliable option because ambitious feels like more. It feels like reaching higher, aiming further, demanding more of yourself and the world. And sometimes that is exactly right — sometimes the ambitious choice is the one that produces the breakthrough.
But there are moments where reliability is not the opposite of ambition. Where reliability is the foundation that makes ambition possible. The closer is one of those moments. By choosing a reliable closer, I did not lower my ambitions for the show. I raised them. Because now the show ends every time. Every time. The mountaintop is reached, the audience arrives at the destination, the promise is kept. And the emotional impact of that reliable arrival is greater than any technical spectacle could produce, because the audience feels the completeness of it. The satisfaction of a journey that has a real ending.
My worst closer taught me that a fragile climax is worse than no climax at all. That the most technically impressive moment in the world is worthless if it depends on conditions you cannot guarantee. That the audience’s trust — their willingness to follow you for twenty-five minutes, to invest their attention and their emotional energy, to believe that you are taking them somewhere worth going — is a trust that you must never, under any circumstances, betray.
The closer is where that trust is either honored or broken. There is no middle ground.
What I Tell Myself Before Every Show
Before every performance, during the few minutes of quiet I take before walking out, I run through the same mental sequence. I think about the opener. I think about the personality piece. I think about the middle section, the participation moments, the building routines. And then I think about the closer.
And what I tell myself about the closer is this: this one is bulletproof. This one works every time. This one does not depend on luck, or conditions, or hope. This one is mine.
That confidence — the absolute certainty that the ending will land — changes everything that comes before it. I am more relaxed in the opener because I know where the show is heading. I am more generous in the personality piece because I am not hoarding energy for a technically demanding finish. I am more present during the participation because I am not mentally rehearsing a complex sequence.
The bulletproof closer does not just protect the ending. It protects the entire show. It is the foundation that everything else is built on. And foundations, by their nature, are not flashy. They are not the part of the building that people photograph. They are the part that keeps the building standing.
My worst closer taught me to build foundations. And every show since has stood on that lesson.