I want to tell you about two performances that happened on the same night.
It was a corporate event in Vienna, one of those evening functions where a mid-sized tech company had rented a floor at a hotel near Stephansplatz to celebrate the end of a successful quarter. About eighty people, open bar, music, and me — hired to do close-up magic at the tables between courses. I had my set list prepared. I was going to lead with my favorite piece, the one I had been working on for months in hotel rooms across Austria, the one that used a method so clever I still got a little thrill every time I executed it.
This was the effect I showed to magician friends online. The one where they responded with fire emojis and “that’s beautiful, man.” The one that Adam Wilber had told me was “really smart.” I was proud of it. I loved performing it. I was convinced it was the strongest thing in my repertoire.
I performed it at the first table. Six people. Finance department, based on the conversation I overheard while approaching. I went through the routine, hit every beat, nailed every moment. The method was invisible. The execution was clean. And when I reached the climax — the moment that should have produced gasps — I got… polite smiles. A couple of nods. One person said, “That’s nice.” Another looked at her phone.
That’s nice.
I moved to the second table, adjusted my energy, and performed the same piece. Similar reaction. Pleasant confusion. A vague sense that something had happened, but no real engagement, no emotional punch.
By the third table, I was rattled. Something was wrong. The effect was clean. I knew it was clean because I had performed it hundreds of times in practice, recorded myself, watched the recordings, and confirmed there were no flashes or tells. The method was bulletproof. So why was the audience not reacting?
I abandoned the piece for the fourth table and pulled out something simpler. Something I had almost left out of my set because it felt too basic. Too easy. Not impressive enough for magician eyes. A spectator names a card. Just thinks of one. And without me touching the deck, that card is revealed in an impossible location. That is the entire effect. One sentence. No phases. No conditions. No setup.
The table went berserk.
Not polite smiles. Not nods. Actual, vocal, hands-on-the-table astonishment. One man pushed his chair back and stood up. A woman grabbed her colleague’s arm. Someone said, “How is that possible?” — which is, if you perform magic, approximately the most beautiful sentence in any language.
I performed that simple effect for the remaining tables. Every single one reacted more strongly than any table had reacted to my clever, beloved, method-intensive piece.
That night, sitting on the bed in my hotel room with a glass of wine and a growing sense of humility, I tried to understand what had happened. The clever piece was technically superior. The method was more elegant. The sleight-of-hand was harder. By every metric I had been using to evaluate magic, it was the better trick.
And it did not matter. Not even a little.
The Book That Explained Everything
A few weeks later, I picked up Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic, and within the first few chapters, I found the distinction that explained my Vienna disaster with surgical precision.
Ortiz draws a line between two fundamentally different kinds of magic: magic that impresses magicians and magic that impacts audiences. These are not the same thing. They are often opposites.
Magic that impresses magicians tends to be method-centric. It features clever solutions to technical problems. It involves difficult sleight-of-hand or ingenious procedural constructions. When a magician watches it, they appreciate the ingenuity — the “how” is what generates the reaction. They understand how hard the method is. They can evaluate the gap between what was done and what the audience saw. That gap is impressive to someone who understands both sides of it.
But here is the brutal truth: the audience only sees one side. They do not see the method. They do not know it exists. They cannot evaluate the difficulty. They cannot appreciate the cleverness because the cleverness is, by definition, invisible to them.
What the audience sees is the effect. And if the effect is confusing, convoluted, or emotionally flat, it does not matter how brilliant the method is. The method serves the effect, not the other way around.
This distinction hit me like a brick. Because for years, I had been evaluating my repertoire the way a magician evaluates magic. Not the way an audience experiences it.
The Magician’s Trap
Here is how the trap works. And I fell into it completely.
When you start learning magic, you spend most of your time inside the method. You watch tutorials. You practice sleights. You study handlings. You read magic books that describe, in minute detail, how to execute specific procedures. Your entire relationship with magic, for months or years, is a relationship with methods.
And because you spend so much time inside the method, you start to value what is hard. Complex methods feel more impressive because they are harder to learn. Clever solutions feel more elegant because you can appreciate the problem they solve. Difficult sleights feel more meaningful because you remember how long they took to master.
This is entirely natural. It is also entirely backwards.
The audience does not care how hard something was. The audience does not know what problem the method solved. The audience has no framework for evaluating technical difficulty. They are not watching a magic competition. They are watching a performance, and they are asking one question, whether they know it or not: “Did something impossible just happen?”
That is the only question. And the answer depends entirely on the clarity and emotional impact of the effect, not the sophistication of the method.
My Vienna piece failed because the effect was confusing. There were multiple phases. The audience had to track several conditions. The climax depended on them remembering something that had happened two minutes earlier. By the time I reached the payoff, they had lost the thread. They knew something had happened, but they were not sure exactly what. And confusion is not the same as astonishment. A confused audience is not a fooled audience. They are just confused.
The simple effect worked because the audience understood instantly what had happened and why it was impossible. They thought of a card. That card appeared somewhere it could not possibly be. There was no tracking, no conditions, no memory required. The impossibility was immediate, direct, and clear.
Where Magician Approval Leads You Astray
After Vienna, I started paying attention to where I was getting my validation. And the pattern was alarming.
The effects I posted in magic forums got the most praise. Other magicians told me they were impressed. They pointed out the technical difficulty. They appreciated the methodology. I felt good about my magic.
But those were not the effects that generated the strongest reactions from actual audiences. The effects that made people gasp, laugh, grab their friends, and talk about it the next day were almost always the simpler ones. The ones that were almost embarrassingly straightforward from a method perspective.
This created a genuine conflict for me. Part of my identity as a magician was tied up in technical skill. I had spent hundreds of hours in hotel rooms learning difficult techniques. Admitting that a simple, almost self-working effect produced better reactions than my hard-won technical showcase felt like admitting those hours were wasted.
They were not wasted. But they were not serving the purpose I thought they were serving. Technical skill is a tool. It gives you options. It expands what you can do. But it is not, in itself, entertainment. A master chef does not serve raw technique on a plate. The technique serves the dish.
The Two Audiences Test
Here is a filter I started using after reading that book, and it has saved me from performing dozens of effects that would have died on stage.
For every piece in my repertoire, I ask two questions:
First: Would a magician be impressed by the method? If I showed this to another performer and explained how it works, would they say something like “that’s clever” or “that’s beautiful”?
Second: Would a non-magician be astonished by the effect? If I showed this to someone who knows nothing about magic, would they have a strong, clear, emotional reaction to what they saw?
The ideal effect scores high on both. The method is clean and elegant AND the effect is clear and powerful. These effects exist. They are the gold standard.
But when there is a conflict — when the method is brilliant but the effect is mediocre, or when the effect is strong but the method is basic — I now always choose the strong effect. Every time. Without exception.
This was a difficult adjustment. My ego wanted to perform the clever methods. My craft wanted to show off what I could do. But my audience — the people who actually matter in a performance — wanted to be astonished. And astonishment comes from the effect, not the method.
The Feedback Loop Problem
There is a deeper problem here. When magicians watch other magicians, they are watching like detectives — evaluating technique, trying to figure out methods, comparing what they see to what they know. Their emotional response is filtered through technical analysis. This creates a feedback loop: magicians show magic to magicians, adjust their material based on magician reactions, and end up with magic optimized for magicians. Then they perform for a real audience and cannot understand why it falls flat.
I have been in this loop. I performed at an informal gathering in Salzburg, maybe fifteen magic enthusiasts, and got great feedback. My technique was impressive, they said. My method choices were interesting. Then I performed the same material at a corporate event the following week and watched it die. Because the material was built for the wrong audience.
The Humility of the Simple Effect
There is a kind of humility required to embrace simple, direct effects when you have the skill to execute complex ones. It feels like driving a Ferrari in first gear. You know you can do more. You want to do more. But “more” is not what the moment requires.
The consultant in me recognizes this pattern. In business, the most effective strategies are almost always the simplest ones. The ones that can be explained in one sentence. The ones where everyone in the room immediately understands what you are doing and why. Complexity in strategy, like complexity in magic, usually signals confusion rather than sophistication.
That night in Vienna taught me something I carry into every performance now. Before I add any effect to my set list, I imagine performing it for someone who has never seen a magic trick in their life. Someone who does not know what a sleight is, does not care about methods, and is just sitting at a table having a nice evening. If the effect would not astonish that person — if it requires any knowledge of magic to appreciate, if its impact depends on understanding what was difficult about the method — then it does not belong in my show. No matter how much I love performing it.
The audience does not owe you a reaction because you worked hard. The audience reacts when something genuinely astonishing happens to them. And “genuine astonishment” is not about technical difficulty. It is about clarity, directness, and emotional impact.
That is what this entire section of the blog is about. Over the next nineteen posts, I am going to dig into the craft of choosing material — not based on what impresses us as performers, but based on what moves the people we perform for. It starts with an uncomfortable admission: much of what we love about our magic has nothing to do with what our audiences love about it.
And once you accept that, everything changes.