There was a period, maybe eight months long, when I thought I had figured it out.
My show was working. The keynotes were landing. The mentalism pieces got genuine gasps. The corporate clients were happy, the feedback was positive, the bookings were steady. I had built something from nothing — a guy who bought his first deck of cards in a hotel room, stumbling through online tutorials from ellusionist.com, had somehow assembled a performance that held rooms of executives and left them talking about it afterward.
I remember sitting in a hotel room in Vienna after a particularly strong show, thinking: this is it. I have arrived. I can relax.
That thought — “I can relax” — is the most dangerous thought a performer can have. Not because relaxation is bad. But because “I can relax” is never really about relaxation. It is about permission. Permission to stop scrutinizing. Permission to stop doing the hard, uncomfortable work of finding what is wrong with something that appears to be working.
“I can relax” is “good enough” wearing a better outfit.
The Consulting Lesson
In my strategy consulting work, I have watched the “good enough” trap destroy companies. Not quickly. Not dramatically. Slowly. Invisibly. The way a slow leak destroys a foundation.
The pattern is always the same. A company builds something that works. Revenue is strong. Customers are satisfied. The leadership team decides they have earned the right to maintain rather than push forward.
For a while, this works. The numbers hold. There is a lag between complacency and consequence, and that lag feels like validation. See? Nothing bad happened.
Then a competitor makes a small improvement. Then the market shifts and your product is no longer exactly what the customer wants, but it is close enough that you do not notice the drift. Then you lose a contract you expected to win, and the reason is something you could have fixed six months ago.
The mechanism is universal: the moment you define your current level as acceptable, you begin falling behind everyone who has not.
The Magic Parallel
Performance magic amplifies this mechanism because the feedback loop is uniquely forgiving.
Audiences are polite. They clap. They tell you it was great. But “enjoyed themselves” encompasses a vast range, from “that was a pleasant way to spend thirty minutes” to “that was one of the most extraordinary things I have ever witnessed.” Both experiences get the same feedback: applause and a smile.
So the performer delivering pleasant thirty minutes and the performer delivering extraordinary thirty minutes receive nearly identical signals. The difference is invisible unless you are looking for it. And when you have decided the show is “good enough,” you stop looking.
Ken Weber captures this with a phrase that I have written on a card and taped to my laptop: “Never settle for good enough.” He follows it with another instruction that is equally direct: “Sweat the details.”
The combination of those two ideas — never settle, and the way to not settle is to obsess over details — is the antidote to the “good enough” trap. It is not about vague aspiration. It is not about some abstract commitment to excellence that sounds good in a motivational speech but dissolves on contact with reality. It is about a specific practice: every detail of your performance is a candidate for improvement, and the moment you stop examining details is the moment you start coasting.
The Scott Alexander Warning
Scott Alexander, in Standing Up On Stage, puts it even more bluntly. He writes about the top performers he knows — Mike Finney, Johnny Thompson, Mac King — and notes that they are always finding something new to put in. A look, a slight twist of a phrase. Always improving. And then he delivers the warning that hit me like cold water:
If you work really hard and get all your ducks in a row and then say, “I now have a perfect act,” you are dead in the water.
Dead in the water. Because the moment you declare perfection, you stop the process that brought you to where you are. You freeze the mechanism that produced your best work and expect the frozen result to sustain itself.
It does not. A show that is not evolving is a show that is dying, even if the death is so slow that neither you nor the audience can detect it yet.
I read that passage about a year into my performing practice and recognized myself in it. I had not declared my act perfect. But I had entered the neighborhood of “good enough,” and the real estate is equally deadly.
What “Good Enough” Looks Like in Practice
Let me describe what “good enough” looked like in my specific case, because I think the concrete details are more useful than the abstract principle.
I had a mentalism piece in the middle of my show that involved predicting a decision an audience member would make. The setup took about ninety seconds. The effect itself was strong — genuinely surprising. The audience always reacted well.
But the setup was workmanlike. It got the job done. It communicated the necessary information. It was clear and efficient and completely unremarkable. The audience sat through it patiently because they could sense something interesting was coming, and the payoff justified the patience.
For six months, I performed that setup the same way. It worked. The effect landed. Why mess with it?
The answer to “why mess with it” arrived when I watched another performer handle a similar setup. His version took the same ninety seconds, communicated the same information, but was alive in a way mine was not. He turned the setup into a miniature story. He created suspense within the setup itself, not just in the effect that followed. He made the audience care about the decision before they even knew there was going to be a decision.
I went back to my own version and looked at it with fresh eyes. And I saw it for what it was: a functional paragraph in a show that needed a compelling opening chapter. It was good enough. It was not good.
I spent two weeks rewriting the setup. I tested five different versions in five different hotel rooms, talking to the mirror, recording myself on my phone, listening back. The final version was twenty seconds shorter and incomparably more engaging. The audience now leans forward during the setup instead of waiting through it. The effect that follows hits harder because the setup has already created emotional investment.
That improvement was available to me for six months. I did not pursue it because the original version was working. “Good enough” had blinded me to the gap between functional and excellent.
The Systematic Approach
After that experience, I built a systematic challenge to “good enough” into my practice routine. Every month, I choose one element of my show that is working and ask: is this element as good as it can be, or is it merely good enough?
I ask three questions, borrowed from consulting:
If I were seeing this for the first time as a stranger, what would my honest reaction be?
If I had unlimited time and energy, what would I change? This removes the practical constraints that serve as excuses for “good enough.” When you take away the constraints, you can see the ideal version.
If the best performer I have ever watched were doing this element, what would be different? The answer is always “a lot.” But it gives you specific targets.
The monthly audit has become one of the most valuable practices in my entire approach to improvement. It is uncomfortable every time. It requires me to look at something I am proud of and find the flaws. But it is also the practice that has produced the most significant improvements in my show over the past year.
The Consulting Mindset
Here is something I have learned from two decades in strategy consulting: in business, “good enough” gets you replaced.
Not immediately. Not obviously. But inevitably. The client satisfied with your “good enough” work meets a competitor who delivers something slightly better. The product that was “good enough” last year is inadequate this year because the market moved and the product did not.
A performer can coast for years on a “good enough” show because audiences are polite and the feedback loop is soft. But the underlying dynamic is the same. Somewhere, another performer is improving. Somewhere, the standard is rising even if your performance is not.
The consulting mindset says: assume that “good enough” is temporary. Assume that your competition is improving even when you are not. And act accordingly.
The Mantra in Action
“Never settle for good enough” sounds like a motivational poster. I know that. The words, by themselves, are vapid. Every performer would nod along and agree and then go back to performing the same show they performed last week.
The mantra becomes useful only when it is attached to a practice. Here is mine:
After every performance, before I allow myself to feel satisfied, I write down three things that were “good enough” but not excellent. Three specific moments, transitions, words, or choices that were functional but not optimal.
These are not failures. These are not problems. They are areas where the performance was adequate and could be better. The distinction matters. I am not cataloguing errors. I am identifying opportunities.
Then, before my next performance, I choose one of those three items and commit to improving it. Not all three. One. The one that I think will make the biggest difference to the audience’s experience.
This is a simple, repeatable, sustainable practice. It takes five minutes after a show and fifteen minutes of focused rehearsal before the next one. It does not require inspiration or creativity or any special resource. It requires only the willingness to look at something that is working and ask: could this work better?
The answer is always yes. Always. No matter how good the show is, no matter how strong the audience response, no matter how satisfied the client — there is always something that could be better. Not because the show is bad. But because perfection is asymptotic. You approach it without ever reaching it, and the approach itself is the entire point.
The Paradox of Satisfaction
I want to acknowledge the tension here. The relentless pursuit of improvement can become pathological. If you never allow yourself to feel satisfied, if every show is just a collection of things to fix, you drain the joy from the craft. And without joy, the craft dies faster than it would from complacency.
So the practice is not “never feel good about your work.” The practice is “feel good about your work, and then, separately, examine it honestly.” The satisfaction and the scrutiny coexist. They serve different functions. Satisfaction fuels your love of performing. Scrutiny fuels your growth as a performer. You need both.
The danger is when satisfaction crowds out scrutiny entirely. When “I feel good about that show” becomes “that show does not need to be better.” When the emotional warmth of a successful performance melts the analytical discipline that produced it.
“Never settle for good enough” is not a rejection of satisfaction. It is a rejection of the idea that satisfaction and improvement are the same thing. You can be deeply satisfied with how far you have come and simultaneously committed to going further. In fact, that combination — gratitude for the present and ambition for the future — is the only sustainable fuel for long-term growth.
The show is always getting better. The day it stops getting better is the day it starts getting worse. There is no steady state.
Never settle.