There was a period — maybe six months, probably longer — when I thought I was doing well.
I had finished a corporate keynote in Linz, one of those mid-size manufacturing conferences where the audience is a hundred and fifty engineers and managers who did not choose to be there and would rather be checking their emails. My talk had gone fine. The magic elements landed. People clapped at the right moments. A few came up afterward to say they enjoyed it, that the mind-reading segment was impressive, that they had never seen anything like it. The event organizer shook my hand, said they would definitely consider me for next year’s conference. The check arrived on time.
By every measurable standard, this was a success.
And I believed that for a while. I believed it through three or four more events that went roughly the same way. Applause. Polite compliments. Rebookings. Nobody walked out. Nobody complained. The feedback forms probably said “good” or “very good” or whatever people write when they want to be encouraging without being specific.
Then one night in my hotel room in Salzburg, I watched the video.
I had been recording my performances for a while by then, but I had fallen into a pattern of watching them once and filing the footage away. That night, I watched the Linz recording three times in a row.
And on the third viewing, I saw something that made my stomach drop. The audience was not astonished. They were being polite.
There is a difference, and it is enormous. Astonishment looks like mouths opening, people turning to each other with wide eyes, the half-second of total silence before the reaction hits. Politeness looks like steady clapping, half-smiles, people putting their phones down just long enough to watch the climax before picking them up again.
My audience in Linz had been polite. Not astonished. Not moved. They had seen something competent. And competent was enough for them to say nice things, enough for the rebooking conversation to happen.
That is the sixty-percent success trap, and it nearly swallowed me whole.
What Sixty Percent Looks Like
Ken Weber, in his Maximum Entertainment, draws a distinction that haunted me the moment I read it: the difference between polite response and genuine impact. All magic, he argues, exists on a hierarchy. At the bottom is the puzzle — the audience knows it is impossible but assumes the secret is simple. In the middle is the trick — a demonstration of perceived skill. At the top is the extraordinary moment — the reaction that leaves no room for explanation, where the viewer gasps rather than grasps for a method.
Most performers, including me during that period in Linz, live in the middle of that hierarchy. We are delivering tricks. The audience recognizes skill, appreciates effort, and responds accordingly. They clap. They smile. They tell you it was good.
And that is the trap. Because good is the enemy of great. Not bad — good.
If my show in Linz had bombed, I would have torn it apart. I would have stayed up all night rewriting, rethinking, restructuring. Failure is painful, but failure demands action. Failure grabs you by the collar and forces you to change something.
But a sixty-percent success rate does not demand anything. It is comfortable. It is survivable. It pays the bills, if performing is your livelihood. It gets you rebooked, which feels like validation. It produces just enough positive feedback to convince you that what you are doing is working, while quietly ensuring that you never reach the level where your audience walks out of the room talking about you for the next three weeks.
I have come to think of it as the professional equivalent of a C-plus. You pass. You move forward. Nobody raises an alarm. But deep down, if you are honest with yourself, you know you are coasting.
The Compliment Problem
One of the reasons the sixty-percent trap is so effective is that audiences are extremely generous with positive feedback.
Think about it from their perspective. They have just watched a live performance. A human being stood in front of them and did something that required preparation, skill, and courage. Nobody wants to be the person who walks up to a performer afterward and says, “That was fairly average.” So they say it was great.
And here is the insidious part: they are not lying. The bar for live entertainment in most people’s lives is so low that a competent magic show really is the most impressive thing they have seen in a while. They are comparing you not to Copperfield or Derren Brown but to the last office party where the entertainment was a DJ who played the same twenty songs. So when they tell you it was great, they believe it. And you believe them. And nobody in this transaction has any incentive to ask whether “great compared to most corporate events” is actually the standard you should be measuring yourself against.
I fell into this loop for months. Every event confirmed my belief that I was on the right track. Every compliment reinforced the idea that my material was strong, my delivery was polished, my show was ready. The feedback was consistently positive, which meant there was no signal telling me to change anything.
The signal I was missing was the absence of a different kind of reaction. I was not getting the gasps. I was not getting the moments of stunned silence. I was not getting the people who grabbed my arm afterward and said, with actual emotion in their voice, “How did you do that?” I was getting handshakes and business cards and “very nice show.” And I had mistaken that for success.
The Video Does Not Lie
This is why the camera became the most important tool in my development, not just for catching technical mistakes but for catching emotional ones.
When you watch your performance on video, the social pressure disappears. The audience on screen cannot see you watching them. You cannot read their polite body language as enthusiasm because you are not in the room feeling the warmth of their attention. You see what actually happened.
And what I saw, watching that Linz recording for the third time, was an audience that was comfortable but not captivated. They were watching me the way you watch a television show that is fine but not great — present, attentive enough, but not leaning forward. Not holding their breath. Not gripping the arm of the person next to them.
The camera showed me something else, too. It showed me why.
My pacing was flat. I moved from one effect to the next at roughly the same tempo, with roughly the same energy. There were no valleys, which meant there were no peaks.
My transitions were functional but not engaging — pleasant, inoffensive patter that keeps the show moving without creating genuine connection. And most damning of all, I was not building to anything. The show had a beginning, middle, and end, but no arc. No crescendo. Each effect was roughly as strong as the last, which meant none of them felt climactic.
I was performing a series of individually competent effects. I was not performing a show.
The Honest Accounting
After that night in Salzburg, I started keeping what I call an honest accounting of my performances. Not the polite version. Not the version where compliments count as evidence of quality. The real version.
For each show, I would ask myself three questions:
First: was there a moment in this performance where the audience genuinely forgot they were watching a show? Not just a moment where they were impressed or entertained, but a moment where the magic became real for them, where the normal rules of reality seemed to bend, where they were pulled out of their analytical minds and into something they could not explain. If the answer was no, the show was not good enough.
Second: would someone who was at this event tell a friend about it tomorrow? Not mention it in passing — actually tell the story. Actually try to recreate the feeling of what they experienced. If the answer was probably not, the show was not good enough.
Third: if I could watch this show performed by someone else, would I be moved by it? Would I sit in the audience and think, “This person is extraordinary”? Or would I think, “This person is competent”? If the honest answer was the latter, the show was not good enough.
These questions are brutal. They are designed to be brutal. Because the entire purpose of this exercise is to break through the comfortable insulation of polite feedback and sixty-percent success and “that was really good” compliments and get to the truth of whether what you are creating is genuinely exceptional.
Most of the time, when I started asking these questions, the answer was no. The show was not good enough. And that hurt. It hurt a lot, actually, because I had been telling myself a different story — the story where I was already good, where the positive feedback was real, where the rebookings were earned on merit rather than on adequacy.
But the hurt was useful. The hurt was the thing that had been missing during those months of comfortable success. The hurt was the signal that something needed to change.
What I Changed
I stopped measuring success by whether the audience clapped and started measuring it by whether there was at least one moment that produced a reaction I could not have gotten from any other type of entertainment. Not a polite reaction. A magical one. The kind where someone’s face changes, where their eyes go wide, where they look at the person next to them as if to confirm that what just happened actually happened.
That meant rethinking my material. Effects that worked fine but were not extraordinary had to go. I replaced them with fewer, stronger pieces. I would rather perform four extraordinary effects than eight good ones. A show that peaks four times is more memorable than one that cruises at a steady, pleasant altitude for forty-five minutes.
I also changed my pacing, building deliberate valleys into the show so that the peaks would feel like peaks. And I changed my standard for self-evaluation — watching not for what went right but for what was merely adequate. Because adequate is the enemy. Adequate is what keeps you at sixty percent.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here is what I wish someone had told me during those months of comfortable success in Linz and Graz and all those mid-size corporate conferences where I was doing fine:
The audience will never tell you that you are mediocre. They do not have the vocabulary for it, and even if they did, they would not use it. They will tell you it was great. They will mean it. And you will believe them.
But you know the difference. Somewhere inside, past the ego and the need for validation and the relief of having gotten through a show without disaster, you know whether what you did was extraordinary or merely competent. You know whether you gave them something they will remember or something they will forget.
The sixty-percent success trap works because it feels like success. The applause sounds real. The compliments feel genuine. The rebookings seem like proof that you have arrived. But sixty percent is not arrival. Sixty percent is the most comfortable form of stagnation, and it will keep you exactly where you are for as long as you let it.
The way out is simple, though not easy. Stop accepting good as the standard. Start asking whether what you are doing is extraordinary. And when the honest answer is no — which it will be, often — treat that not as a failure but as information. Information about what needs to change. Information about what the next level looks like. Information about the gap between where you are and where you could be.
The gap is where the real work lives. And the real work is the only thing that will get you past sixty percent.
I am still working on it. Some nights I get there. Some nights I do not. But at least now I know the difference, which is more than I could say during those months in Linz when I thought I was succeeding and the applause was just polite enough to prove me right.