I watched two performers do the same effect on the same evening.
It was at a magic convention in Vienna, one of those events where performers showcase their material back to back. The evening show had a roster of about a dozen acts, and two of them happened to be performing variations on the same basic premise: a prediction sealed in an envelope, opened at the end by a spectator. The structure was nearly identical. The outcome was the same. The audience knew what was coming in both cases.
The first performer was good. Competent. Polished. He hit all the marks. The audience applauded warmly at the end, the way you applaud when something has been done well and you appreciate the effort. I clapped too. It was a solid performance.
The second performer changed three things.
First, when she placed the envelope on the table at the start, she did not announce it. She set it down without comment, as if it were incidental. Just a thing on the table. The first performer had held his envelope aloft and explained its significance at length. She let the envelope sit there, unexplained, and the audience’s curiosity did the work instead.
Second, at the moment of revelation, when the spectator was about to open the envelope, she paused. Not a dramatic, theatrical pause — not the kind where the performer freezes with arms extended and the lights dim. Just a natural pause. A breath. A moment where she looked at the spectator with genuine interest, as if she herself was not entirely sure what was about to happen. That pause lasted maybe two seconds longer than what the first performer had done.
Third, she said one sentence after the reveal that the first performer did not say. I will not quote it exactly because the specific words are hers, but it was a simple, human observation that reframed the entire effect from “look what I predicted” to “look what just happened between us.” It made the audience feel like participants rather than witnesses.
Three changes. A silent placement instead of an announcement. Two additional seconds of pause. One sentence of reframing.
The audience did not applaud. They erupted. People were turning to each other with their mouths open. Someone at the table next to me said “What the hell” loud enough for the whole room to hear. It was a fundamentally different response to a fundamentally similar effect.
That evening taught me more about performance than a year of practice.
The Invisible Gap
Darwin Ortiz makes a point in Strong Magic that has stayed with me ever since I first read it: the difference between a trick that merely puzzles people and one that genuinely astonishes them often comes down to seemingly small choices in presentation. The method can be identical. The props can be the same. But the way the effect is framed, the way the audience’s attention is directed, the way the moment of impossibility is experienced — these presentation details are what separate a puzzle from a miracle.
This idea seems obvious when stated plainly. Of course presentation matters. Everyone knows presentation matters. But here is the thing: most performers, including me for a long time, think about presentation in broad strokes. They think about having a good script, being confident, making eye contact, projecting their voice. These are the big, visible elements of presentation.
What they do not think about — what I did not think about — are the granular, moment-to-moment choices that the audience processes unconsciously. The half-second pause that creates anticipation versus the half-second rush that kills it. The word “happened” versus the word “appeared.” The choice to look at the spectator’s eyes versus looking at the spectator’s hands during a key moment. These choices are so small that most performers are not even aware they are making them.
But the audience feels the difference. They cannot articulate it. If you asked them why the second performer was better than the first, they would say something vague like “she had more presence” or “it felt more real.” They would not say “she paused for two additional seconds before the reveal.” They cannot see the mechanism. They only experience the result.
Watching the Professionals
Once I started looking for minor differences, I could not stop seeing them.
I attended a conference in Graz where a well-known corporate mentalist was performing. I had seen his material before on video, so I knew the structure of his show. This time, instead of watching as an audience member, I watched as a student. I sat in the back row with a notebook and tried to capture every choice he made that I would not have made.
The list was long.
He entered from the side of the stage rather than the center, which meant the audience had to turn slightly to see him. This created a moment of collective orientation — everyone shifting in their seats simultaneously — that produced an unconscious sense of shared experience before he had said a single word.
When he spoke to volunteers, he stood slightly closer than I would have. Close enough that the microphone picked up their responses naturally, making the whole interaction feel intimate even in a room of two hundred people.
When something surprising happened, he did not react first. He waited. He watched the audience react, and then he reacted to their reaction. This tiny inversion made him seem like he was experiencing the magic alongside them rather than performing it at them.
These are not techniques you will find in any instruction book. They are micro-decisions, the kind of choices that develop through thousands of hours of performance. Individually, each one is almost invisible. Collectively, they are the difference between good and great.
The Consulting Parallel
In my strategy consulting work, I have seen this same phenomenon in business. Two companies competing in the same market, selling similar products, with similar pricing and similar quality. One of them consistently outperforms the other. When you do the analysis, the explanation is never one big thing. It is always a collection of small things.
The faster company answers inquiries four hours sooner. Their packaging opens more easily. Their website loads half a second quicker. None of these differences move the needle alone. Together, they create an experience that customers prefer without being able to explain why.
Performance magic works the same way. The audience evaluates you based on the cumulative experience of every moment they spend watching you, shaped by hundreds of micro-decisions that happen below the threshold of conscious awareness.
What I Started Doing Differently
I made a list of ten moments in my show that I considered “functional” — moments that served their purpose but were not specifically designed for maximum impact. These were the transitions, the opening lines of each routine, the handling of props, the way I invited volunteers forward, the specific words I used to frame each effect.
Then, for each of those ten moments, I asked one question: what would the best performer I have ever seen do differently here?
Not better in some vague, aspirational sense. Differently. Specifically. Concretely. What would change?
The answers were always small. For my opening, I realized I was walking to center stage and speaking immediately. The best performers I had studied all did something before speaking — a look, a gesture, a moment of stillness. The something was different for each of them, but the pattern was the same: a beat of non-verbal communication that established presence before words took over.
I tried it. At my next keynote in Innsbruck, I walked to center stage, stopped, looked at the audience, and waited two full seconds before speaking. Two seconds. It felt like an eternity to me. To the audience, it probably felt like nothing. But the energy in the room shifted. I could feel the attention tighten. When I did speak, the first sentence had weight that it had never had before.
Two seconds. That was the difference.
For my volunteer selection, I had been saying some variation of “I need someone to help me with this.” Functional. Clear. Completely unremarkable. I changed it to addressing a specific person directly, using something I had noticed about them — their expression, their body language, something they had said during the earlier parts of the event. This tiny personalization transformed the moment from a generic transaction into a specific human connection.
For my transitions between effects, I had been using verbal bridges: “And now, for something different.” Functional. Dead. I replaced them with silence and physical movement. I would finish one effect, let the applause settle, walk to a different part of the stage, and begin the next piece as if it were a new conversation. The transitions stopped being connective tissue and became small resets that refreshed the audience’s attention.
None of these changes were dramatic. None of them would be visible on a bullet-point list of “show improvements.” But each one moved the needle slightly, and the cumulative effect was noticeable. The shows felt different. The audience engagement was deeper. The feedback shifted from “that was great” to “that was amazing” — and the distance between those two responses is where careers are made.
Why This Is Hard
The difficulty of minor differences is that they require a level of self-awareness that most performers do not naturally possess. You have to be able to see your own performance at the granular level while simultaneously executing that performance. This is, to put it mildly, a difficult cognitive task.
Video review helps enormously. But even video requires you to know what to look for. When I first started recording my performances, I watched for obvious errors: did I fumble a line, did I forget a step. Those are important, but they are the easy problems. The hard problems — the ones that separate 5,000th from 500th — are not errors. They are suboptimal choices. Moments where what you did was functional but not compelling.
Spotting the difference between acceptable and compelling requires reference points. You need to have seen compelling often enough to recognize its absence. This is why watching great performers is essential. Not just for entertainment. For calibration.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The minor differences framework contains an uncomfortable truth: if the gap between good and great is small, then the reason most performers are good but not great is not lack of talent or ability. It is lack of attention to detail. It is the failure to examine, question, and optimize the small choices that accumulate into an audience’s total experience.
This means that the barrier to greatness is not some inherent limitation. It is a choice. The choice to scrutinize every moment. The choice to question every word. The choice to watch yourself with the same critical eye you would use to watch a competitor.
Most performers do not make this choice. Not because they are lazy or unserious, but because the returns on small improvements are invisible in the short term. You change one word and the audience response does not dramatically shift. You add a half-second pause and nobody sends you an email saying “that pause was extraordinary.” The feedback loop is slow and noisy.
But the improvements compound. Each minor difference interacts with every other minor difference. The pause affects the word that follows it. The word affects the audience’s emotional state. The emotional state affects their reaction to the next effect. And by the end of the show, the cumulative impact of fifty minor differences is the difference between an audience that claps politely and an audience that cannot stop talking about what they just experienced.
I am still ranked far below where I want to be. But I know now that the path upward is not paved with dramatic breakthroughs. It is paved with minor differences, pursued relentlessly, one at a time.
The question is never “How do I get dramatically better?”
The question is always “What small thing can I do differently?”