I watched it happen at a corporate event in Vienna.
The performer was good. Let me be clear about that, because what I am about to describe is not a story about someone who was bad at magic. He was not bad at magic. His technique was clean. His sleight of hand was invisible. His prop work was smooth and polished. He had clearly put in thousands of hours of practice, and the results showed. From a technical standpoint, everything he did was executed at a level that most hobbyists would never reach.
He was also putting the room to sleep.
I could see it happening in real time. The audience — about two hundred people at a technology company’s annual dinner — had started engaged. They were curious. A magician at a corporate event is novel enough to earn a few minutes of genuine attention. But as the performance continued, the energy in the room shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It was more like a slow leak. People reached for their wine glasses. Quiet side conversations started at the tables in the back. A few phones appeared under table edges, held below the sightline in the universal posture of someone who is technically still watching but has mentally left the building.
The performer did not seem to notice. He was locked into his material, executing one technically demanding sequence after another, each one a demonstration of skill that any magician would have admired. But the audience was not made up of magicians. It was made up of software engineers and project managers and sales directors who had been promised an entertaining evening and were slowly realizing that what they were getting was a skills exhibition.
By the fifteen-minute mark, the room’s attention was holding on by a thread. By the twenty-minute mark, the thread had snapped for most of the tables. By the time the performer took his bow, the applause was polite and brief — the kind of applause that says “that’s over now” rather than “that was incredible.”
The technique had been flawless. The reactions had been nonexistent.
The Line That Haunts Me
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, describes a performer with a line that I have not been able to get out of my head since I first read it: “Here is what he mastered: the technique of magic, but not the magic of magic.”
That distinction — between the technique of magic and the magic of magic — is the most important distinction in this entire art form. And it is the distinction that the performer I watched in Vienna had missed entirely.
The technique of magic is the mechanical execution. The moves, the handlings, the prop work, the choreography of hands and objects. It is learnable, practicable, and measurable. You can watch your own hands in a mirror and assess whether the technique is clean. You can record yourself and evaluate whether the execution is smooth. Technique has clear standards. Either the move is invisible or it is not. Either the handling is natural or it is forced.
The magic of magic is what happens in the audience. The gasp. The laugh. The moment of rapt attention where someone forgets they are at a corporate dinner and falls entirely into the experience. The magic of magic is a reaction in another human being, and it cannot be practiced in front of a mirror. It can only be produced in the moment, in the space between performer and audience, through the alchemy of framing, timing, emotional engagement, and human connection.
You can have flawless technique and zero magic. The performer in Vienna proved that. And you can have imperfect technique and abundant magic, as I have seen from performers whose hands were not particularly skilled but whose ability to make a room full of people lean forward and hold their breath was extraordinary.
Why Technical Skill Is Not Enough
I think about this problem a lot because I came to magic with a skill-acquisition mindset. My consulting career trained me to believe that competence was the primary currency. Get good enough at the work, and success follows. Master the skills, deliver the results. The better your technique, the better your outcomes.
In magic, this turns out to be dangerously incomplete. Technique is a necessary foundation, but it is not a sufficient one. A technically brilliant performance that produces no reactions is not a successful performance. It is a successful exhibition of practice results. It is a recital, not a concert. The audience can see that you are skilled without being moved by what you are doing.
The reason is that audiences do not experience technique. They experience effects. And effects are not defined by how they are executed but by how they land. A card change that is technically perfect but poorly framed will register as “oh, that’s neat.” The same card change, executed with slightly less technical polish but framed with a story, timed with a pause that builds tension, and revealed at a moment when the audience has been led to care about the outcome, will register as genuine astonishment.
The technique matters because it enables the effect. But the technique is not the effect. The effect is the reaction. And the reaction is produced by everything else — the framing, the timing, the emotional investment, the relationship with the audience, the context, the moment.
The Fizzle Pattern
I have watched enough performers now, both live and on video, to recognize what I call the fizzle pattern. It looks like this:
The performer opens strong. The first effect gets a good reaction because it has novelty on its side. The audience is fresh, curious, and willing to be impressed. The first impossible thing they see gets a genuine response because they were not expecting it.
The second effect gets a slightly smaller reaction. Still good, but the novelty factor has diminished. The audience now knows what kind of show this is. They are no longer surprised that impossible things are happening. The performer needs something other than novelty to sustain the energy.
The third effect gets a smaller reaction still. The technique is still flawless. The impossibilities are still impressive. But the audience has settled into a pattern of passive observation. They are watching with interest but not reacting with intensity. The energy in the room has leveled off at a plateau that is well below the opening peak.
The fourth and fifth effects continue the decline. The performer may not even notice, because from their perspective, they are executing at the same level throughout. Their internal experience has not changed. But the audience’s experience has, because the performer has offered nothing new in terms of how to feel — only new demonstrations of the same type of skill.
By the end, the applause is respectful but muted. The performer walks off thinking it went well. The audience walks out thinking it was fine. Nobody is talking about it the next day.
That is the fizzle. A slow, steady decline from genuine engagement to polite tolerance, driven not by poor technique but by the absence of reaction targets. The performer never gave the audience a reason to laugh, never built genuine tension, never created a moment of emotional investment that went beyond “let’s see what this person can do next.” The show was a sequence of demonstrations, each one technically excellent, none of them aimed at the gut.
The Sizzle Alternative
The opposite of the fizzle is what I think of as the sizzle — a show where the energy builds rather than decays, where each moment feeds into the next, where the audience is not just watching but reacting throughout.
The sizzle does not require better technique. It requires better targeting. The performer who sizzles is not necessarily more skilled than the performer who fizzles. They are more intentional about which reactions they are pursuing and more disciplined about designing every moment to hit one of the Big Three.
A sizzle show might open with a moment of astonishment to establish credibility, then shift to a story that creates rapt attention, then use a spectator interaction that produces laughter, then build to a bigger astonishment. The audience experiences variety. Their emotional state is constantly shifting. They never settle into passive observation because they never have time to — each new moment asks something different of them.
I have seen performers with mediocre technique produce sizzle shows. They compensated for their technical limitations with superior audience awareness, better timing, funnier interactions, and more compelling framing. The audience did not notice the imperfect technique because they were too busy reacting to what was happening in front of them. Their attention was occupied by the experience, not the execution.
This is not an argument against developing technique. Technique gives you more options. It enables effects that simpler methods cannot achieve. It creates headroom. But it is an argument against the belief that technique alone will produce reactions. It will not. Technique produces clean execution. Only framing, timing, and emotional targeting produce reactions.
The Consultant Parallel
I have seen the exact same dynamic in my consulting work, and recognizing the parallel helped me understand the magic version more clearly.
In consulting, there are analysts who produce flawless slide decks. Every chart is perfectly formatted. Every data point is sourced. Every conclusion follows logically from the evidence. The work is technically impeccable. And the client nods politely and nothing changes.
Then there are consultants who present the same quality of analysis but frame it around a story that the client feels in their chest. They open with a provocative question. They build tension around the implications of the data. They use a specific example that makes the abstract personal. The client leans forward. The client argues. The client takes action.
The difference is not in the quality of the analysis. It is in whether the presentation targets a reaction. The first analyst is demonstrating competence. The second is producing engagement. Same underlying work. Radically different outcomes.
When I recognized this parallel, I realized that the fizzle problem was not unique to magic. It is universal. It happens everywhere that a skilled person confuses the quality of their work with the quality of the audience’s experience. The work can be superb. If it is not designed to produce reactions, it will fizzle.
The Honest Question
If you are a performer who has invested heavily in technique — and if you are reading this blog, there is a good chance that you have — there is an honest question you need to ask yourself. It is not a comfortable question. I did not find it comfortable when I asked it of myself.
The question is: when I watch recordings of my performances, am I watching myself or am I watching the audience?
If you are watching yourself — evaluating your technique, checking your angles, admiring your execution — you are optimizing for the wrong thing. You are building a car and evaluating it by how well the engine is machined rather than by how it feels to drive.
If you are watching the audience — noting where they react, where they drift, where they light up and where they go flat — you are optimizing for the right thing. You are measuring what matters. Not how well you performed, but how strongly they reacted.
I spent a long time watching myself. The shift to watching the audience was one of the most productive changes I have made as a performer. Because the audience does not care about your technique. They cannot see it. They cannot evaluate it. They do not know what is hard and what is easy, what is clever and what is simple. They only know what they feel. And if they feel nothing, then all your technique, all your practice hours, all your beautiful invisible moves are producing exactly one thing.
A fizzle.
The sizzle comes from somewhere else entirely. It comes from designing every moment of your show to hit one of three targets, and from accepting that everything else — including the technique you are most proud of — is only a delivery system. The technique is the vehicle. The reaction is the destination.
No one ever left a show talking about how smooth the performer’s technique was. They left talking about how they felt. Make them feel something, and the technique takes care of itself in the background, invisible and irrelevant, which is exactly where it belongs.