I performed what I thought was my best piece at a corporate awards dinner in Vienna. It was technically demanding, visually clean, and had a climax that I was genuinely proud of. The audience applauded warmly. People said nice things afterward. It was a success by any reasonable measure.
Then, about forty minutes later, during the awards portion of the evening, the host invited the recipients up one at a time and spoke about their contributions to the company. One woman received an award for twenty years of service. As she walked to the stage, visibly moved, her colleagues gave her a standing ovation. Several people were wiping their eyes.
Standing there watching, something hit me. The emotional reaction to that moment — a genuine human milestone being celebrated — was deeper and more powerful than anything my magic had produced that evening. My performance had been impressive. This moment had been moving. And moving beat impressive every single time.
I went home that night and sat at my kitchen table for a long time, thinking about the difference between effects that impress people and effects that make people feel something.
The Cleverness Trap
For the first couple of years of my magic journey, I selected effects based on cleverness. How surprising was the climax? How impossible was the method? How elegant was the construction? I was evaluating magic the way I evaluate business strategy — on the sophistication of the architecture.
This is a natural bias for someone who comes from the consulting world. We’re trained to appreciate complexity, to admire the intricacy of a well-designed system. And when I encountered an effect with a clever construction, my brain lit up with the same satisfaction I felt when encountering a well-designed corporate strategy.
But here’s the problem: the audience doesn’t experience the architecture. They experience the effect. And an effect that is architecturally brilliant but emotionally empty lands like a perfect sentence in a language nobody speaks. Technically flawless, communicatively hollow.
Darwin Ortiz put his finger on something in Strong Magic that crystallized this for me. He writes about how the effect happens in the spectator’s mind — not in the performer’s hands, not in the props, but in the internal experience of the person watching. And Cara Hamilton, in Storytelling for Magicians, goes even further by arguing that what makes that internal experience memorable is not the surprise itself but the emotional content wrapped around it.
When I read those two perspectives back to back, something clicked. I’d been optimizing for the wrong variable. I’d been maximizing surprise when I should have been maximizing feeling.
The Emotional Spectrum of Magic
Not all emotions in magic are created equal, and it took me a while to develop a vocabulary for what I was trying to create. Here’s the spectrum as I’ve come to understand it:
At the base level, there’s surprise. This is the most common emotional response to magic, and it’s the one most performers optimize for. Something unexpected happens. The audience is startled. It’s a genuine emotion, but it’s also the most fleeting. Surprise dissipates in seconds. Within minutes, the surprise is a memory. Within days, it’s faded.
Above surprise, there’s wonder. Wonder is surprise with a quality of openness to it. Instead of “how did that happen?” the spectator thinks “what kind of world allows that to happen?” Wonder lingers. It creates a sense of expanded possibility. But wonder, too, fades relatively quickly once the rational mind kicks back in.
Then there’s delight. Delight combines surprise with joy. Something wonderful happened, and it made the spectator happy. A child’s reaction to a simple appearance effect is pure delight — not analytical, not suspicious, just a burst of happiness. Delight is stronger than surprise because it connects to the pleasure centers of the brain, not just the novelty detectors.
Above delight, there’s meaning. This is where the emotional content of magic becomes genuinely powerful. Meaning occurs when the impossible event connects to something the spectator cares about — a relationship, a memory, a hope, a fear. When magic becomes a vehicle for meaning, the effect is no longer about the trick. It’s about the human experience the trick illuminates.
And at the top of the spectrum — rare, difficult, and extraordinary when achieved — there’s catharsis. This is the moment when magic makes someone feel something so deeply that it releases tension they didn’t know they were carrying. I’ve seen this happen maybe three or four times in my performing life, and each time it left me shaken too.
Choosing for Feeling
Once I understood this spectrum, I started evaluating effects differently. Instead of asking “how surprising is this?” I started asking “what does this make people feel?”
Some effects are inherently emotional and some aren’t, and no amount of presentation can change the fundamental emotional DNA of an effect. A complex card routine where multiple cards change positions in a sequence is architecturally impressive, but its emotional content is essentially neutral. It impresses the mind without touching the heart.
Compare that to a ring vanishing from the performer’s hand and reappearing on the spectator’s finger — their own finger, where it was before they lent it. The emotional content of that effect is built into its structure. The ring is personal. The return is personal. The fact that it returns to where it belongs — home — carries an emotional resonance that no amount of complex card manipulation can match.
I started looking for effects with this kind of built-in emotional architecture. Effects where the plot itself — independent of method, independent of presentation — contains emotional content.
Here are some of the structural patterns I found:
Return effects. Something that belongs to someone comes back to them in an impossible way. This connects to the deep human experience of loss and recovery, of things returning to where they belong. It’s profoundly satisfying at a level that goes beyond surprise.
Revelation effects. A prediction or divination reveals something personal about the spectator — a thought, a choice, a memory. This connects to the human desire to be truly known, to be seen and understood. When done well, it doesn’t feel like a trick. It feels like connection.
Transformation effects. Something ordinary becomes something extraordinary. This resonates with the universal human hope that things can change, that the mundane contains hidden potential. It’s a metaphor for growth, for possibility.
Protection effects. The performer proves that a dangerous or risky situation actually had a safety net all along. This connects to the human need for security and the relief of discovering that you were protected when you thought you were vulnerable.
Connection effects. Two objects or two people are shown to be linked in some impossible way. This resonates with the human hunger for connection, for the sense that we are not isolated individuals but part of a larger pattern.
The Presentation Layer
Built-in emotional architecture is just the foundation. How you present the effect — how you frame it, what story you tell — amplifies or diminishes the emotional content enormously.
I learned this the hard way. I had an effect with excellent emotional architecture — a prediction that revealed something personal about a volunteer — but I was presenting it as a demonstration of skill. “Watch this, I’m going to predict what you’ll think.” The framing was about me. The emotional content of the effect was smothered by the ego of the presentation.
When I reframed the same effect as being about the spectator — “There’s something interesting about how we think, and I want to show you something about your own mind” — the emotional response transformed. Same method. Same effect. Completely different emotional experience. The words you use before and during an effect establish the emotional context. Are you performing at the audience, or sharing an experience with them? Are you the hero, or are they?
The Moment at the Event in Klagenfurt
Let me share a moment that solidified this understanding.
I was performing at a retirement party for a senior executive in Klagenfurt. About sixty people, warm atmosphere, genuine affection for the person being honored. Before my set, I spent time talking with some of the attendees, learning about the retiree’s career, her personality, her interests.
During my performance, I included an effect — one I’d been developing specifically for events with a personal dimension — where a prediction I’d written before the event revealed something about the guest of honor. I won’t describe the mechanics, but the revelation connected to a private running joke that her team shared, something she treasured about her workplace relationships.
When the prediction was revealed, the room didn’t just react to the impossibility. They reacted to the personal connection. The retiree’s eyes filled with tears. Not from the trick — from the fact that someone had taken the time to learn something intimate about her world and woven it into a moment of impossible beauty.
Several people came up to me afterward and said variations of the same thing: “That wasn’t a trick. That was a gift.”
That sentence changed my performing life. That was a gift. They weren’t distinguishing between impressive and emotional. They were telling me that what I’d done had transcended the category of “trick” entirely and entered the category of “meaningful human experience.”
The Selection Filter
Here’s how I now evaluate effects for my repertoire:
First question: what emotion does this effect naturally evoke? If the answer is only “surprise,” it needs extraordinary presentation to earn its place, because surprise alone is the weakest emotional outcome. If the answer includes wonder, delight, meaning, or any deeper emotional response, it moves up the priority list.
Second question: can this effect be personalized? Can the revelation connect to the specific spectator? Personalization is the single most powerful amplifier of emotional content.
Third question: who is the emotional center of this effect? If the answer is “me, the performer,” I rework the presentation until the answer is “the spectator.” Effects where the spectator is the emotional center are almost always stronger.
Fourth question: will the spectator remember this in a year? Clever effects are forgotten quickly. Emotional effects linger. Without exception, the effects people mention to me months later are the ones that made them feel something.
The Cost of Emotional Ambition
Choosing effects for emotional content is harder than choosing effects for cleverness. It requires more preparation, more personalization, more vulnerability. You have to learn about your audience. You have to be willing to create moments that might fall flat if the emotional connection doesn’t land.
There were times where I aimed for emotion and missed. A sentimental framing that came across as manipulative rather than genuine. A prediction that was supposed to feel intimate but felt invasive instead. These failures taught me that emotional content in magic must be earned, not imposed. You cannot make someone feel something by telling them to feel it. You can only create the conditions in which feeling naturally arises.
Beyond “Cool”
The consultant in me spent years evaluating everything — business strategies, product designs, marketing campaigns — on the axis of cleverness. Is it smart? Is it innovative? Is it elegant?
Magic broke me of that habit. Or rather, magic showed me that the cleverness axis is necessary but not sufficient. An effect can be brilliant and forgettable. An effect can be simple and unforgettable. The difference is not in the architecture of the trick. It’s in what the trick makes the audience feel.
I still appreciate clever effects. I still admire elegant constructions. But when I’m choosing what to perform — when I’m standing in front of my repertoire and deciding which effects deserve the limited time I have with an audience — I reach for the ones that make people feel something.
Because at the end of the evening, nobody remembers how clever you were.
They remember how you made them feel.