It started with a drawer.
Not a metaphorical drawer. A literal drawer in my home office in Austria, stuffed with props, gimmicks, decks, packets, and assorted bits of magical hardware that I had accumulated over two years of enthusiastic purchasing. Next to the drawer was a shelf. Next to the shelf was a box under the desk. And in the closet in the spare room, there were three more boxes that I had promised myself I would organize “when I had time.”
I never had time. Nobody ever has time. What I had instead was a growing sense of unease every time I opened that drawer and stared at the pile. Things I had bought after watching a trailer online. Things Adam had sent me from Vulpine Creations product testing. Things I had picked up at conventions because the dealer demonstrating them was brilliant and I confused their skill with the quality of the effect. Things I had performed once, gotten a lukewarm reaction, and shoved into the drawer with a vague plan to “work on the presentation later.”
The drawer was a monument to my inability to say no to a clever idea.
The Moment of Reckoning
The trigger was a keynote I did in Graz where I performed a forty-minute set and walked off stage feeling like something was wrong. The audience had been fine. The event organizer was happy. But I knew, with the certainty that comes from performing something enough times, that the set was not as strong as it should have been. There were effects in the middle that landed with a thud. There were moments where I could feel the audience’s attention drift. There were pieces I was performing not because they were great, but because I had already packed them and they filled time.
That night in the hotel room, I wrote a list of every effect in my working repertoire. Not the drawer effects, not the aspirational effects, not the “someday” effects — just the ones I was actually performing in shows. The list was twenty-three items long.
Twenty-three effects. Some of them were excellent. Some of them were adequate. And some of them, I realized as I stared at the list, were there only because I had invested time learning them and could not bring myself to admit they were not working.
The consultant in me recognized the pattern immediately. It was the sunk cost fallacy, dressed up in sequins and playing cards. I kept performing material that was not earning its place, because cutting it would mean admitting the time I had spent learning it was time I would never get back.
I needed to audit every piece of material I owned and subject it to criteria that had nothing to do with how much time I had invested and everything to do with whether it belonged in my show.
The Audit Process
The following weekend, I cleared the dining table, opened every drawer, unpacked every box, and laid out my entire collection. Props, cards, packets, mentalism items, utility devices, everything. Then I set up a camera on a tripod and started performing.
I performed every effect I owned, one at a time, to the camera. No audience, no pressure, just me and a lens. Then I sat down and reviewed the footage.
The review was brutal. Effects I thought were strong looked lifeless on camera. The patter I had been proud of sounded flat. The clever moments I believed were impressive turned out to be confusing — even I had trouble following the logic when I watched myself explain them.
Other effects surprised me in the opposite direction. Things I had dismissed as “too simple” looked clean, clear, and compelling on video. The simplicity that made me feel like I was not doing enough turned out to be exactly what made the effect readable and impactful from the audience’s perspective.
I created a spreadsheet — because of course I did, I am a consultant — and I ran every effect through four questions. These questions were not ones I invented. They grew out of my reading of Darwin Ortiz’s evaluation framework in Strong Magic and Ken Weber’s director’s perspective in Maximum Entertainment. But the specific formulation was mine, born out of months of performing and watching what worked and what did not.
Question One: Does It Produce Genuine Reactions?
Not polite applause. Not “that’s nice.” Genuine reactions. Gasps. Laughter. Confusion. Delight. The kind of reaction where you can see it on people’s faces and feel it in the room.
This was the first and most important filter. I went through my performance notes — I had started keeping a simple log after every show, noting which effects got strong reactions and which ones fell flat. Some effects consistently produced strong reactions across different audiences, different venues, different contexts. Those passed immediately.
Others were inconsistent. They worked sometimes, with certain audiences, under certain conditions. I flagged these for further examination. Inconsistency is not automatically a death sentence — sometimes it means the effect needs a different presentation or a different placement in the show. But it is a warning sign.
And then there were the effects that never really got a strong reaction. Not once. I had been performing them for months, and the best I had ever gotten was a polite nod. These were the hardest to let go of, because many of them were effects I personally loved. The methods were elegant. The concepts were fascinating. But the audience did not care about elegant methods or fascinating concepts. The audience cared about feeling something.
Question Two: Can I Describe It in Two Sentences?
This was the clarity test. If I could not describe what the audience would experience in two simple sentences, the effect was too complicated. Not too complicated to perform — too complicated to experience.
I tested this by imagining I was describing each effect to someone who had never seen magic. “A spectator selects a card and it appears inside my wallet.” Clear. “A borrowed ring vanishes from a spectator’s hand and reappears inside a sealed envelope that has been on the table from the beginning.” Clear.
Now compare: “A spectator selects a card, which is placed back in the deck. The deck is shuffled and cut multiple times. The performer deals cards into several piles based on criteria chosen by the spectator. Through a process of elimination using the spectator’s freely chosen numbers, one card remains, and it is the selected card.” That is technically a description of an effect, but by the time you finish reading it, you have forgotten what the point was.
This test eliminated five effects from my repertoire in one pass. Five effects that I had been performing regularly, that I had patter for, that I could execute cleanly. But none of them could be described simply because the experience of watching them was inherently convoluted. The audience had to follow too many steps, track too many conditions, remember too many details. By the time the climax arrived, nobody was sure what they were supposed to be amazed by.
Question Three: Does It Fit My Character?
This was the identity test. I am not a comedy magician. I am not a mysterious mentalist in a dark suit. I am a strategy consultant who does keynote speaking and weaves magic into presentations about innovation, perception, and creative thinking. My character, such as it is, is the smart outsider who discovered something unexpected and wants to share it with you.
Some effects fit that character perfectly. Mentalism pieces where I demonstrate something about how perception works. Visual moments that illustrate a point about attention or assumption. Interactive effects where the audience participates in discovering something surprising about their own thinking.
Other effects did not fit at all. I had a beautiful manipulation sequence that I had spent weeks learning. It was technically solid and visually stunning. But it had nothing to do with who I am on stage. When I performed it, there was a jarring disconnect — the audience was watching a consultant suddenly turn into a magician, and the shift felt wrong. Not bad, just wrong. Like a jazz musician suddenly playing a classical concerto in the middle of a set. The individual notes were fine. The context was off.
I cut the manipulation sequence. I cut two other effects that had a similar problem — they were strong magic but they belonged in someone else’s show. Effects that would be perfect for a magician whose character was built around visual spectacle. That was not me. Keeping them in my show was like wearing someone else’s perfectly tailored suit. It might look good objectively, but it does not look good on me.
Question Four: Does It Earn Its Slot?
This was the economics test. Every effect in your show takes time. Time to set up, time to perform, time to transition out of. In a forty-minute keynote with magic, every minute matters. Every effect that takes five minutes is five minutes that another effect cannot have. The question is not “is this effect good enough to perform?” The question is “is this effect better than every other effect that could occupy the same five minutes?”
This is opportunity cost, plain and simple. The same principle I apply to business strategy every day. A good idea is not worth pursuing if it comes at the expense of a great idea. An adequate effect is not worth performing if it takes time away from a spectacular one.
I ranked every surviving effect by strength of audience reaction per minute of performance time. The effects at the top of the list were the ones that produced the strongest reactions in the shortest time. The effects at the bottom were the ones that took a long time to build and delivered a modest payoff.
The bottom third got cut.
The Aftermath
When the audit was complete, I had eliminated twelve of my twenty-three working effects. Just over half. And from the broader collection — the drawer effects, the shelf effects, the closet boxes — I pulled out only three additional pieces that I thought were worth developing.
The remaining fourteen effects were my core repertoire. Every one of them passed all four tests. Every one of them produced genuine reactions, could be described in two sentences, fit my character, and earned its slot in terms of impact per minute.
The first show I did with the trimmed repertoire was a conference keynote in Vienna, and the difference was immediate. Not just in audience reaction — though the reactions were noticeably stronger — but in my own experience of performing. I felt lighter. I felt more confident. Every transition was cleaner because every piece belonged. There were no dead spots, no filler, no moments where I was performing something I half-believed in.
The audience, of course, had no idea that I had cut twelve effects. They did not know what they were not seeing. They only knew that everything they saw was strong. And that is exactly the point. The best editing is invisible. Nobody notices what you removed. They only notice that what remains is excellent.
The Ongoing Process
The audit was not a one-time event. I now review my repertoire every few months, applying the same four questions. Effects that were strong six months ago sometimes weaken as my character evolves or as my audiences change. New effects get added and need to prove themselves against the existing lineup.
I also keep what I call a “development bench” — effects that are not ready for performance but show potential. These get practiced in hotel rooms, tested on willing friends, and occasionally trial-run at smaller events where the stakes are lower. If they pass all four tests after a trial period, they earn a place in the working repertoire. If they do not, they go back into the drawer.
The most valuable thing the audit taught me was that my show is not a museum. It is not a place to display everything I have collected or everything I can do. It is a curated experience, and curation means choosing. It means saying no to good things so you can say yes to great things.
Half my collection did not survive the audit. My show has never been stronger.