I used to watch other magicians the way a failing student watches the kid who always gets the top mark.
Not with admiration. With calculation. I would sit in the audience at a magic convention or a showcase event and try to measure the gap between what that person was doing and what I was doing. Were their sleights cleaner than mine? Was their patter sharper? Did their audience react more strongly? Was their stage presence more commanding? And if the answer to any of these questions was yes — which it usually was, because I was still relatively new to performance — I would leave feeling smaller than when I arrived.
This happened at a convention in Vienna. I had attended a close-up showcase where five performers each did ten-minute sets, and one of them — a guy maybe five years younger than me, effortlessly charming, with the kind of natural stage presence that makes you wonder whether some people are just born with it — absolutely destroyed. The audience was in his hands from the first sentence. His timing was impeccable. His material was tight, funny, emotionally engaging, and built to a climax that left the room genuinely speechless.
I sat there applauding with everyone else, and inside I was doing math. How many years would it take me to get that good? Did I even have the raw talent to get that good? Maybe some people are just naturals and the rest of us are pretending. Maybe I should focus on the business side of Vulpine Creations and leave the performing to people who actually have the gift.
That night, in my hotel room, I was scrolling through notes I had taken from various books and masterclasses I had been studying, and I came across a line that stopped me cold. It was from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, quoting the basketball coach Bobby Knight: “You play against your own potential.”
Not your opponents. Not the guy in the showcase who was born charming. Not Derren Brown or David Copperfield or the magician who just blew the roof off the close-up room. Your own potential.
I read it three times. Then I closed my laptop and sat in the dark for a while, thinking about what that actually meant.
The Comparison Trap
Before I explain why Knight’s framework changed everything for me, let me describe what the comparison trap actually looks like from the inside, because I suspect I am not the only one who has fallen into it.
When you compare yourself to another performer, you are doing something that seems rational but is actually insane. You are taking two entirely different human beings — with different backgrounds, different training, different natural abilities, different amounts of stage time — and trying to rank them on a single scale.
I did it at that Vienna showcase. I watched a performer who had probably been on stage since he was fifteen, who had thousands of hours of experience I did not have, and I concluded that I was inferior. Which, by measurable standards, I was. But that conclusion was useless. It told me nothing about what I needed to work on, nothing about where my specific weaknesses were. All it told me was that someone who had been doing this longer was better at it. Which is roughly as insightful as noting that water is wet.
The comparison trap has a second, even more destructive layer. When you measure yourself against other performers, you start making decisions based on what they are doing rather than what you should be doing. You see someone crush with comedy magic and think, “I should be funnier.” You see someone nail a mentalism routine and think, “I should do more mentalism.” None of these thoughts are necessarily wrong. But they are reactive, driven by admiration or envy rather than by an honest assessment of your own strengths and trajectory.
I spent months doing this. Watching other performers and grafting pieces of their approach onto my own act. The result was a Frankenstein show — bits and pieces from different influences stitched together without a coherent identity. It was not bad, exactly. But it was not mine.
The Knight Framework
Bobby Knight was one of the most successful college basketball coaches in American history. He was also, by most accounts, one of the most demanding and difficult. He was not a warm and fuzzy motivator. He was a man who believed that the worst thing you could do to a talented person was let them coast on their talent without ever pushing them to reach their full potential.
His philosophy was deceptively simple: do not play against the other team. Play against your own potential. The opponent is not the people across the court. The opponent is the gap between who you are and who you could be.
This reframing changes everything.
When I stopped asking “Am I better than that guy?” and started asking “Am I performing at my best?”, the entire evaluative framework shifted. The question was no longer comparative. It was absolute. It was personal. And it was, in a strange way, both more demanding and more liberating.
More demanding because the standard is not “better than the average performer at a convention.” The standard is “the best possible version of what Felix Lenhard can do on stage.” That is a moving target. You never catch it. Every time you improve, the target moves further out.
More liberating because the comparison to other performers becomes irrelevant. The guy at the Vienna showcase is playing against his own potential. I am playing against mine. We are not in the same game.
Applying It to My Practice
The first practical change was in how I reviewed my video footage. Instead of watching other performers’ videos and comparing their reactions to mine, I started watching only my own footage, but with a specific lens: not “is this good?” but “is this as good as I can make it?”
That might sound like the same question, but it is fundamentally different. “Is this good?” invites an external comparison. Good compared to what? Compared to whom? “Is this as good as I can make it?” is an internal question. It requires me to know my own capabilities, my own ceiling, my own areas of growth.
And here is what I discovered: when I watched my performances through the lens of my own potential, I found problems I had never noticed before. Not because they were hidden, but because I had been looking at the wrong things.
I had been looking for technical errors — dropped moves, flashed angles, stumbled lines. Those are easy to spot and relatively easy to fix. What I had not been looking for were the places where I was performing safely.
Safe performance is the hallmark of someone who is not playing against their own potential. Using the same vocal register for the entire show because varying it feels scary. Standing in one spot because moving feels vulnerable. Avoiding real eye contact because genuine connection is uncomfortable.
I was doing all of these things. Not because I lacked the ability to do better, but because doing better required risk, and risk felt unnecessary when the safe version was getting polite applause.
The Knight framework forced me to confront this. My potential was the version where I varied my pacing, made genuine eye contact, let the pauses stretch uncomfortably long, dropped the script when spontaneity would serve better than rehearsed words.
The Three Questions
I developed three questions that I ask myself after every performance, and they are all rooted in Knight’s philosophy.
First: did I take at least one genuine risk tonight? Not a reckless risk. Not a risk that endangered the show. But a moment where I chose the harder, more vulnerable, more demanding path instead of the safe one. A moment where I tried something I was not certain would work. If the answer is no, I was not playing against my own potential. I was playing against my own comfort.
Second: was there a specific moment in this show that was better than the same moment in the last show? Not the whole show — one specific moment. One transition that was smoother. One line that landed more naturally. One effect that built more tension. If I cannot identify at least one moment of improvement, I was not growing. I was repeating.
Third: if I could perform this exact show again tomorrow, what would I change? Not hypothetically, not in some ideal future — specifically, concretely, what would I change for the next performance? If I have no answer, I was not paying attention. There is always something to change. Always.
These three questions replaced the old question that used to dominate my thinking after a show: “Was I better than the other performers I’ve seen?” That question is gone. Good riddance.
The Liberating Effect
Here is something I did not expect. When I stopped comparing myself to other performers, I started enjoying watching them again.
At that Vienna showcase, I had watched the charming young magician with a knot in my stomach. His excellence felt like an indictment of my inadequacy. Every laugh he got was a laugh I was not getting. Every gasp was a gasp I could not produce.
A few months after adopting the Knight framework, I attended another showcase. And something had changed. I watched a performer do an incredible mentalism routine, and instead of feeling envious, I felt inspired. Not inspired to copy him, but inspired to push my own work harder. His excellence was not a threat to mine. It was evidence that excellence was possible, which meant my own potential was higher than I had been assuming.
This is one of the underappreciated benefits of playing against your own potential rather than against other people. When other people succeed, it does not diminish you. When someone else has a great show, you can celebrate it genuinely, learn from it freely, and then go back to your own work with renewed energy.
The alternative — the comparison framework — turns every other performer into either a source of insecurity or a target to surpass. That is exhausting. It is corrosive. And it makes the magic community, which should be a place of mutual inspiration and growth, into a silent competition where everyone is keeping score.
The Consulting Parallel
In my consulting work, I had learned this lesson years before I applied it to magic. In strategy consulting, you do not measure your firm against the competition. You measure it against your own potential. The question is not “Are we better than McKinsey?” The question is “Are we delivering the maximum value we are capable of delivering?”
It took me an embarrassingly long time to apply this same principle to performance. But once I did, my practice sessions became more focused — working on my weaknesses, not emulating someone else’s strengths. My show development became more authentic — building something that reflected my own voice, not a collage of other people’s approaches. And my confidence stabilized because it was no longer dependent on being better than anyone else. It was dependent only on being better than I was last month.
The Never-Ending Game
The thing about playing against your own potential is that you never win. Your potential is always ahead of you, always expanding as you grow. Some people find that discouraging. I find it liberating. The game never ends, which means the growth never ends, which means the work always has meaning.
I still fall short, every time I step on stage. But the gap is narrower than it was last year. And that trajectory — the direction, not the position — is what matters.
Bobby Knight probably never thought about magic when he said those words. But he understood something universal about performance, about excellence, about the human tendency to look sideways when we should be looking inward.
You play against your own potential. Not the guy at the showcase. Not the legend you watched on television. Not the version of yourself that exists in your most optimistic fantasies. The version of yourself that could exist if you did the work, took the risks, and refused to settle for safe.
That is the only competition that matters. And it is the only one you have any chance of winning.