I was sitting in a hotel bar in Salzburg after a corporate keynote, nursing a coffee, feeling pretty good about myself.
The show had gone well. The audience had laughed in the right places. The mentalism piece at the end had landed with genuine gasps. The event organizer had shaken my hand and said the thing they always say when they are satisfied: “That was really something.”
On the drive back, I had replayed the performance in my head. The pacing felt right. The transitions were smooth. By the time I sat down with that coffee, my internal narrative was clear: I am getting good at this.
Then my phone buzzed. Adam had sent me a video link. “Watch this,” the message said. No context, no explanation. Just the link.
It was a performance video of a mentalist I had never heard of, working a corporate event that looked almost identical to the one I had just done. Same format. Same kind of audience. Same general scale. Except that this performer was operating on a level so far above mine that watching it felt like looking through a window into a different profession entirely.
The effects were not wildly different from what I do. The format was recognizable. But the execution — the timing, the audience management, the confidence, the way every word seemed chosen with surgical precision — made my own performance feel like a rough draft by comparison.
I watched the video twice. Then I closed my phone and stared at the coffee and had one of those moments where your self-image does a sudden, violent recalibration.
The Thought Experiment
A few weeks later, I came across a passage in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that crystallized exactly what I had been feeling. Weber describes his son Darryl, who was a competitive junior tennis player. By his late teens, Darryl had developed all the basic strokes. He could take the court with any touring professional and win points. If you watched them play just a few rallies, you would have a hard time telling who was the professional and who was the teenager.
But Darryl was ranked around 200th nationally.
Not 200th in his neighborhood. Not 200th in his region. 200th in the country. Which sounds impressive until you realize there were hundreds of players above him who looked almost identical in casual observation but were consistently, measurably better.
Weber then poses the question that rearranged my brain: what if magicians and mentalists had a ranking system like tennis? Where would you rank?
That question sat in my chest like a stone. Because I had spent the last several months operating under the comfortable assumption that I was “getting good,” without ever defining what “good” meant relative to anyone else. I was measuring myself against where I had been, which is a valid thing to do, but I was doing it exclusively. I had no external benchmark. I had no ranking.
The Comfortable Delusion
Here is what I think happens to most performers, especially those of us who are not full-time professionals. We develop our material in relative isolation. We perform for audiences that are generally polite and generally impressed because most people have never seen live magic performed competently. We get positive feedback. We improve. And at some point, the improvement feels significant enough that we start telling ourselves a story about where we stand.
For me, that story went something like: “I started from nothing a few years ago, and now I can hold a room of fifty corporate executives for thirty minutes. That puts me in a pretty select group.”
And in one sense, that is true. Most people cannot do what I do. Most people would be terrified to stand in front of a room and attempt to read someone’s mind or make a borrowed object vanish. The mere ability to do it at all is a real achievement.
But that is like saying “I can play tennis” and feeling satisfied. The question is not whether you can play. The question is whether you can play at the level that genuinely maximizes the audience’s experience. And answering that question honestly requires you to look at who else is playing and what they are doing that you are not.
I was not doing that. I was comparing myself to the version of me that had never held a deck of cards, and congratulating myself on the distance I had traveled. Which felt great but told me almost nothing about the distance still ahead.
The Honest Assessment
So I tried Weber’s thought experiment. I sat down one evening in a hotel room in Linz and attempted to honestly rank myself among all the performers doing what I do.
The first problem was scope. How many performers are there in the world doing mentalism and magic at corporate events? Thousands at a professional or semi-professional level. Tens of thousands if you include serious amateurs.
The second problem was criteria. Tennis rankings are based on match results — objective, measurable outcomes. Magic has no such system. But Weber points out that figure skating manages to rank performers whose art is largely subjective, and FISM competitions apply objective criteria to magic performances. The idea is not absurd. You can evaluate technical execution, audience engagement, originality, stage presence, pacing, and emotional impact. The numbers may be imperfect, but they are better than no measurement at all.
I tried to be brutally honest. I compared my technical skills, scripting, stage presence, audience handling, and consistency to what I had seen from the best performers I had ever watched, live or on video.
My honest assessment: I was somewhere around 5,000th in the world. Maybe higher if I was being generous, lower if I was being harsh. But somewhere in that range. Good enough to impress audiences who had never seen better. Not good enough to impress anyone who had.
That number stung. It is not a pleasant thing to assign yourself a ranking of 5,000 in anything. Your ego fights it immediately. It throws up objections: “You are better than that” and “Those performers have been doing this for decades” and “You are comparing yourself to full-time professionals when you are a consultant who does this as part of keynote speaking.”
All of which are true. And all of which are irrelevant to the audience sitting in front of you.
Why the Audience Does Not Care About Your Excuses
This is the part that the consulting background actually helps with. In my strategy work, I have seen countless companies explain away mediocre performance with perfectly logical explanations. “We are smaller.” “We entered the market later.” “We have fewer resources.” Every one of those explanations is true, and every one is completely invisible to the customer comparing your product to the alternative.
The audience at a corporate event does not care that I have only been performing for a few years. They do not care that I am primarily a consultant. They care about the thirty minutes they are spending watching me. During those thirty minutes, I am either giving them an experience at the level they deserve, or I am not.
The ranking thought experiment strips away every excuse and forces you to look at the output. Not the input, not the effort, not the trajectory. The output.
The Paradox: Honesty as Fuel
Here is what I did not expect. The honest self-assessment, which should have been demoralizing, turned out to be incredibly motivating.
When I was telling myself “I’m getting good,” my improvement was unfocused. I was working on whatever caught my attention. I was tinkering. I was enjoyably engaged in the craft without any clear sense of where my gaps were or what would move the needle.
Once I accepted that I was ranked roughly 5,000th, I could start asking the productive question: what specifically separates me from the performers ranked 1,000th? What about the performers ranked 500th? What are they doing that I am not?
The answer, as Weber describes with the tennis analogy, is that the strokes look the same. The basic structure is similar. The material is comparable. What separates the ranks is minor differences — a pause here, a word choice there, the way eye contact is managed during a critical moment, the precise timing of a reveal.
This was revelatory because it meant I did not need to reinvent everything. I did not need to throw out my material and start over. I needed to identify the specific areas where small improvements would produce disproportionate results. I needed a coach’s eye. I needed to become my own director.
I started watching performances differently. Instead of watching for entertainment, I watched for the minor differences. What does this performer do in the first thirty seconds that I do not? How do they handle the transition between effects? What is happening with their voice when they deliver the key line? Where are their eyes? What are their hands doing when they are not performing?
The answers were always small. A half-beat pause before a reveal. A shift from formal to conversational register at precisely the right moment. A hand gesture that drew the eye naturally. Nothing dramatic. Nothing you would notice unless you were looking for it.
But these small things were the difference between a ranking of 5,000 and a ranking of 1,000.
What I Changed
I built a system for honest self-assessment. After every performance, I rate myself across six dimensions: technical execution, audience connection, pacing, scripting delivery, stage presence, and emotional impact. I use a simple 1-10 scale for each. And I force myself to identify the one dimension where I scored lowest and make that my primary focus for the next practice session.
This is not complicated. It is not revolutionary. But it requires the one thing most performers avoid: admitting where you are weak in specific, concrete terms.
The first time I did this after a show in Vienna, I scored myself a 4 on pacing. Four out of ten. I had rushed through the second half of the show because I was running long and panicked about the time. The audience probably did not notice, or if they did, they attributed it to something else. But I noticed. And that 4 became the thing I worked on for the next two weeks.
The next show, my pacing was a 6. Still not great, but better. Two weeks after that, it was a 7. The improvement was tangible, measurable, and directly attributable to the honest assessment.
The Number Is Not the Point
I want to be clear about something. The specific ranking does not matter. Whether I am 5,000th or 3,000th or 8,000th is unknowable with any precision. The number itself is fiction.
But the act of trying to assign the number is not fiction. It is the act of standing in front of a mirror and looking without flinching. It is the act of asking “How do I actually compare?” instead of “How far have I come?”
Both questions have value. But the second one, which is the one most of us naturally ask, is the comfortable question. It tells you what you want to hear. The first question is the useful question. It tells you what you need to hear.
I still feel good about how far I have come. I still feel pride in the fact that I started with nothing and built a performance practice from scratch. Those feelings are legitimate and I am not interested in replacing them with self-flagellation.
But alongside those feelings, I now carry the honest awareness that I am nowhere near where I could be. That the performers I admire are operating at a level I have not yet reached. That the gap between me and them is not a chasm, but a collection of minor differences that can be systematically identified and addressed.
That awareness — the ranking awareness, the benchmark awareness, the “where do I actually stand” awareness — is what makes improvement intentional instead of accidental.
And intentional improvement, pursued with honesty and discipline, is how you move up in the rankings.
Even when nobody is keeping score.