For the first couple of years that I performed, my post-show evaluation consisted of exactly one question: Did it go well?
The answer was always one of three things. Yes, it went well. No, it did not go well. Or the most common and least useful answer of all: I think so?
That was it. That was the entire depth of my self-assessment process. I would pack up my props after a corporate event in Vienna or a private function in Graz, drive home or walk back to my hotel room, and run the show through my head in a blurry, impressionistic replay. The audience laughed here. That one moment felt off. The ending got good applause. Overall? Yeah, I think it went well.
This is the equivalent of a strategy consultant finishing a client presentation and evaluating it by saying, “I think they liked it.” In my consulting career, that kind of vague assessment would get you pulled aside by a senior partner and asked pointed questions about specific deliverables, audience engagement metrics, and next steps. Nobody in the business world accepts “I think it went well” as a performance review.
But somehow, when it came to magic, I accepted it without question. For years.
The Book That Changed the Framework
The shift happened when I read Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment. I had picked it up on a recommendation from another performer, expecting a book about presentation tips and maybe some advice on selecting material. What I got instead was something far more fundamental: a complete methodology for thinking about entertainment from the director’s chair.
Weber’s central argument — one that runs through the entire book like a steel cable — is that every performer needs a director. Not a friend who says “that was great” after the show. Not an audience whose applause you use as a measuring stick. A director. Someone who watches with trained eyes, who knows what to look for, who can tell you not just whether something worked but why it worked or why it failed.
The problem, of course, is that most of us do not have directors. We are not in the theatre, where a director sits in the house and shapes the production over weeks of rehearsal. We are solo performers working hotel ballrooms and conference stages, and the only person consistently present at every one of our shows is us.
So Weber’s real argument — the one beneath the surface argument — is that you must become your own director. And becoming your own director requires a methodology far more rigorous than “I think it went well.”
What a Director Actually Does
Before I could learn to direct myself, I had to understand what a director actually does. Not in the abstract, artistic sense. In the practical, show-by-show, moment-by-moment sense.
A director watches. That is the first and most important thing. A director sits in the audience’s position and observes what the audience sees and hears, not what the performer intends to show and say. This distinction — between intention and perception — is the gap where most performers lose themselves. We know what we meant to do. We know what the routine is supposed to look like. We know where the laughs should come and where the astonishment should land. We experience the show from the inside, where everything makes sense because we built it.
A director experiences the show from the outside, where things either work or they do not, and intentions are irrelevant.
A director also evaluates against criteria. Not “did I like it?” but “did it accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish?” Is this moment generating one of the three reactions that matter — rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment? Is this transition keeping the audience engaged or losing them? Is the build working? Is the climax landing? Is the pace right?
These are not subjective questions. They are observable. You can see whether an audience is attentive or drifting. You can hear whether they are laughing or silent. You can feel whether a moment of impossibility registers as astonishment or passes without impact. A director watches for these things with discipline and specificity.
And then a director gives notes. Not “it was good” or “it was bad” but concrete, actionable observations. “The transition between the second and third routine had four seconds of dead air where the energy dropped.” “The reveal in the mentalism piece was undercut by the fact that you started speaking again before the audience had time to process.” “Your opening thirty seconds felt tentative — you established competence but not confidence.”
That level of specificity is what separates a director from an audience member. The audience member gives you applause and tells you afterward that they enjoyed it. The director gives you a map to becoming better.
My Consulting Brain Meets My Performing Brain
What struck me about Weber’s framework was how closely it mirrored what I already knew from strategy consulting. In consulting, we have structured debrief processes. After a major engagement, you sit down with your team and walk through what happened against a defined set of criteria. What were the objectives? Were they met? Where did we lose the room? What questions caught us off guard? What would we do differently?
Nobody in a consulting debrief says “I think the presentation went well” and leaves it at that. You break the presentation into segments. You evaluate each segment against its purpose. You identify specific moments of strength and weakness. You generate actionable next steps.
The irony was not lost on me. I had been applying more analytical rigor to a quarterly strategy update than to the art form I was pouring my creative energy into. In my day job, I would never accept vague self-assessment. In magic, I had been living on it.
Weber gave me permission — and more importantly, a structure — to bring the same systematic thinking to my performances. Not to make magic clinical or joyless. To make the evaluation process rigorous enough that improvement would not be left to chance.
The Shift from Feelings to Data
The first practical change was simple but transformative: I started writing things down.
After every show, before I packed up, before I talked to the client, before the post-performance glow faded, I would find a quiet corner and spend five minutes with a notebook. Not journaling my feelings. Documenting observations.
What was the first reaction I noticed from the audience? Was it where I expected it to be? Where was the first moment the energy dipped? How long was the transition between routines two and three? Did the closing routine build the way I designed it to build, or did it plateau?
Five minutes. Specific. Observable. Written, not thought.
The difference between writing it down and thinking about it later is enormous. When you think about your show later — in the car, in the shower, in bed — your memory reconstructs the performance through the filter of your ego. The good moments get better. The weak moments get explained away. The overall impression smooths itself out into a comfortable narrative: it was fine.
When you write it down immediately, in the raw minutes after the show, you capture details that your memory will later erase or soften. The moment in the second routine where a woman in the front row checked her phone. The transition where you fumbled for words for two seconds. The closing line that got a laugh but not the laugh you expected.
These details are data. They are not pleasant or unpleasant. They are information. And information is what a director works with.
The Questions That Replaced “Did It Go Well?”
Over time, I developed a set of specific questions that replaced my old single-question evaluation. I did not invent these from scratch. They emerged from Weber’s framework, from my own observations, and from what I had learned about structured assessment in my consulting career.
The first question: Did I target the right reactions? For each segment of the show, I know in advance whether I am going for rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment. After the show, I check: did I get what I was aiming for? If I designed a moment for astonishment and got a polite laugh instead, that is important information. The moment might need to be restructured, or my performance of it might need to change.
The second question: Where were the dead spots? Every show has moments where the energy dips. Some of these are designed — a deliberate lowering of intensity before a climactic build. Others are unintentional — transitions that run too long, setups that meander, moments where I lose the thread and the audience feels it. The dead spots are where the director’s eye is most valuable, because they are often invisible from the inside. You are busy doing something during the dead spot. The audience is busy doing nothing.
The third question: Did the build work? A show is not a sequence of unconnected moments. It is a structure that should build, with each piece feeding into the next, each high point higher than the last, culminating in the biggest moment at the end. After the show, I assess whether that architecture held or whether the energy was flat — a straight line instead of a rising one.
The fourth question: How were the transitions? Transitions are the weakest link in most performances. The moment between routines, when the magic of the previous piece has faded and the next piece has not yet begun, is the moment the audience is most likely to disengage. I evaluate each transition specifically: Did I fill it with something engaging? Was there dead air? Did I fumble with props? Was the audience still with me when the next routine began?
The fifth question: Did I rush? This is the question I ask most often because rushing is my default sin. When I am excited, when the audience is with me, when the adrenaline is running, I go faster. And faster, for me, means I steal time from the moments that need it most — the pauses, the reveals, the beats where the magic is supposed to land.
These five questions take less time to answer than the old “did it go well?” question, because they have specific answers. They do not require me to assess the entire show in a single sweeping judgment. They break the show into components and evaluate each one on its own terms.
Why Gut Feelings Lie
I want to be clear about something: gut feelings are not useless. There is a kind of performer’s intuition that develops over time, a sense for when things are clicking and when they are off. I am not suggesting anyone ignore that.
But gut feelings are unreliable as the sole basis for improvement. They are biased toward confirming what we want to believe. They are colored by the most recent moments of the show — if the ending went well, we tend to remember the whole show as going well, even if the middle was weak. They are influenced by the audience’s post-show friendliness, which tells us almost nothing about what they actually experienced during the performance.
Gut feelings are the starting point. The methodology is the work.
I think about a show I did at a corporate event in Salzburg, maybe two years into this process. The show felt average from the inside. Not bad, not great. My gut said: fine. When I sat down with my notebook afterward, the notes told a different story. The opening had landed perfectly — stronger than I realized. The middle section had a dead spot I had not felt during the performance. And the closing routine, which I thought had been merely solid, had actually built beautifully when I reconstructed the audience’s reactions moment by moment.
Without the notebook, I would have filed that show under “fine” and moved on. With the notebook, I discovered that my opening was working better than I thought, that a specific transition needed rewriting, and that my closing was stronger than my internal experience suggested. Three actionable insights from one show, none of which my gut feeling would have given me.
The Director Is Not a Critic
There is an important distinction I want to make, because I think it is easy to read this and hear “be hard on yourself after every show.” That is not what directing yourself means.
A director is not a critic. A critic evaluates and renders judgment. A director evaluates and generates solutions. The question is never “how bad was that?” The question is always “what specifically happened, and what would make it better?”
This is the difference between self-criticism and self-direction. Self-criticism says: “That transition was terrible, I should be better by now.” Self-direction says: “That transition had four seconds of dead air. What can I say or do during those four seconds to keep the audience engaged?”
One of those responses makes you feel worse. The other makes your next show better. A director lives in the second response. Always.
The Methodology as Liberation
I will tell you something that surprised me about adopting a systematic approach to self-evaluation: it made performing more enjoyable, not less.
Before the methodology, I carried a vague anxiety about whether I was good enough. The “I think it went well” assessment left a residue of uncertainty that never fully dissipated. Was I improving? Was I stagnating? Was I actually any good, or were audiences just being polite?
With the methodology, I have answers. Not perfect answers, but real ones. I know what is working and what is not. I know where I have improved and where I still need work. I know the specific things I am going to focus on in my next rehearsal, and I know why.
That specificity is freeing. It replaces vague anxiety with concrete action. And concrete action, over time, produces results that gut feelings never could.
Weber gave me a director in book form. The rest of the work — watching, evaluating, documenting, improving — has been mine. But having the framework changed everything. The difference between “I think it went well” and a systematic director’s assessment is the difference between hoping you are getting better and knowing where you stand.
I prefer knowing.