There is a video of me performing at a corporate event in Salzburg that I have watched approximately forty times. Not because the performance was good. Because it taught me something I needed to learn the hard way.
In the video, I am performing a card effect for a group of about sixty people. The effect itself went well. The audience reacted. The moment landed. But when I watched the recording later that night in my hotel room, I noticed something that made me physically uncomfortable. For nearly the entire routine, I was looking at my hands.
Not at the audience. Not at the person I had brought up to help. Not at anyone. I was staring at a deck of cards as if it were the most interesting object in the universe, talking to the space between my fingers while sixty human beings sat in front of me waiting to be acknowledged.
I was performing for the cards. Not for the people.
The Rule That Sounds Obvious
Scott Alexander writes about eye contact as a fundamental element of character and connectivity in his lecture notes on building a stand-up act. The advice is deceptively simple: scan the room, make personal eye contact with specific sections. Do not just focus on the front rows. Even when the audience is in darkness and you cannot see faces, imagine you can see specific people. Their perception will be that you can, and that you are talking to them personally.
This is not complicated advice. It is not some esoteric performance technique that requires years of study. Talk to people. Look at people. Connect with people.
And yet I break this rule constantly.
The reason, I think, is that the rule conflicts with something that feels instinctively necessary when you are performing magic. You are doing things with your hands. Those things require precision. Your natural instinct is to watch what your hands are doing to make sure everything goes right. The visual monitoring feels essential, like checking your mirrors while driving.
But here is what the video taught me, and what Scott Alexander’s framework confirmed: the audience cannot see what your hands need to do. They can only see where your eyes go. And where your eyes go tells them what matters. If you look at your hands, you tell them your hands are where the interesting thing is happening. If you look at the audience, you tell them that the relationship between you and them is what matters.
One of those messages creates a performance. The other creates a demonstration.
The Difference Between Performing and Demonstrating
I spent my early years in magic demonstrating effects. I would show someone a card trick the way you might show someone how to use a new piece of software. Here is the thing. Here is what happens. Look at the thing. See? The thing changed. Impressive, right?
There was nothing wrong with the effects themselves. The methods were sound, the outcomes were surprising, the impossible happened right on schedule. But the experience for the audience was flat, because I was relating to the props rather than to the people.
This is a trap that I think many performers fall into, especially those of us who came to magic as adults through self-teaching. When you learn from online tutorials and practice alone in hotel rooms, your entire relationship with magic is between you and the objects. You and the deck of cards. You and the coins. You and the cup and balls. There is no audience in the hotel room. There is no one to look at. Your entire practice existence is spent looking at your hands.
So when you step in front of actual people, your muscle memory kicks in and you do what you have always done. You look at your hands. You talk to your hands. You perform for your hands. The audience happens to be there, but they are witnessing something that was not designed for them.
I remember the first time I consciously tried to break this pattern. It was at a small corporate dinner in Vienna, maybe thirty people. I told myself before I walked out: look at them, not at your hands. Sounds simple. It felt like trying to write with my left hand. Every instinct screamed at me to check what my fingers were doing, to visually verify that everything was in the right position, to watch the cards or the coins or whatever I was holding.
The first few minutes were genuinely uncomfortable. I felt exposed. Like performing with a blindfold. I could feel my hands working but I could not see what they were doing, because I was looking at the faces in front of me.
And then something shifted.
What Happens When You Actually Look
When I forced myself to maintain eye contact with the audience, the energy in the room changed. Not metaphorically. Literally. I could feel it.
People who had been politely watching became engaged. They leaned forward. They smiled. They made small sounds of anticipation. One woman at a table near the front started nudging her colleague every time I looked in her direction, as if to say, “He is talking to us.”
I was doing exactly the same material I had done at the Salzburg event. Same effects. Same patter. Same structure. The only difference was where my eyes were directed. And the difference in audience response was enormous.
This makes sense when you think about it from the audience’s perspective. When a performer looks at you, you feel included. You feel like a participant, not a spectator. You feel like this experience is happening for you, personally, in this moment. When a performer looks at their hands, you feel like you are watching someone do a hobby. You are observing, not participating. The fourth wall is intact, and it is thick.
Scott Alexander talks about breaking that fourth wall through eye contact, about making each person in the room feel as though you are talking to them individually. It is not a gimmick. It is the difference between creating an experience and simply showing a trick.
Why I Still Break the Rule
Here is the honest part of this post. I know all of this. I have known it for years. I have experienced the difference firsthand, multiple times, in multiple venues across Austria. I have watched my own video evidence proving that eye contact transforms a performance.
And I still catch myself looking at my hands.
It happens most often during moments of technical complexity, when there is something happening with the props that requires precision and timing. My eyes drift down like water seeking the lowest point. I feel the gravitational pull of the mechanics, and before I am conscious of it, I am staring at my fingers while talking to an empty space above the audience’s heads.
I have developed a few strategies for catching myself.
The first is what I call anchor points. Before a performance, I identify three or four specific spots in the room — not people, but locations — where I will direct my gaze at specific moments during each routine. A table near the front left. A face near the back center. A spot near the exit on the right. These anchor points give me predetermined locations to look at, so that when my eyes want to drift down to my hands, I have somewhere specific to redirect them.
The second strategy is the talking test. If I am speaking, I should be looking at someone. Not at the cards. Not at the table. Not at the floor. If words are coming out of my mouth, my eyes should be on a human face. This is the rule I try to enforce, and it catches probably seventy percent of the violations.
The third strategy is practice without looking. In my hotel room sessions, I started running through routines while deliberately looking away from my hands. Looking at the mirror. Looking at the wall. Looking at an imaginary audience member sitting on the bed. The goal was to build enough tactile confidence that my hands could do their work without visual supervision.
This last strategy has been the most effective, because it attacks the root cause. The reason I look at my hands is that I do not fully trust them to do what they need to do without my eyes checking on them. Building that tactile confidence — that trust in muscle memory — is what eventually frees the eyes to do their real job, which is connecting with the audience.
The Larger Principle
There is a principle here that extends well beyond magic, and as someone who spends most of his professional life in strategy consulting and keynote speaking, I see it everywhere.
In business presentations, people look at their slides instead of their audience. In meetings, people look at their notes instead of the person they are speaking to. In conversations, people look at their phones instead of the face across from them. The pattern is the same: we look at the thing rather than the person.
And the result is the same too. The connection weakens. The message may be heard but it is not felt. The content arrives but the relationship does not deepen. We become people talking to objects in the presence of other people, rather than people talking to people using objects as a medium.
Magic makes this principle viscerally visible because the consequences are immediate. When I look at the audience, the energy rises. When I look at my hands, the energy flattens. There is no delay. There is no ambiguity. The feedback is instant and unmistakable.
The Scan
One technique I have been working on, inspired by Alexander’s advice, is what performers sometimes call the scan. Instead of fixing your gaze on one person for an uncomfortably long time or staring vaguely at the middle distance (which reads as looking at nobody), you move your eyes methodically around the room, making brief but genuine eye contact with individuals in different sections.
The key word is genuine. This is not the robotic left-center-right sweep that public speaking coaches sometimes teach, where you mechanically rotate your head like a lighthouse. It is more like a conversation where you happen to be talking to sixty people at once. You look at someone on the left for a sentence. You shift to someone in the back for a phrase. You make contact with someone near the front for a beat.
Each person you look at feels individually acknowledged. The people sitting near each person you look at feel included by proximity. And the overall effect is that the entire room feels like you are aware of them, present with them, performing for them rather than at them.
I am not good at this yet. Some nights I nail it and the room feels electric. Other nights I revert to my old patterns and spend half the show talking to a deck of cards. But the gap between my best performances and my worst performances almost always comes down to this single variable: where my eyes were directed.
The Ongoing Practice
Adam Wilber once pointed something out to me during a conversation about performance technique. He said that the best performers he has worked with all share one quality: they perform as if the props are incidental. The props are there, the magic happens, but the performer’s attention and energy are directed entirely at the people in the room. The props are tools. The people are the point.
I think about that observation often, usually right after watching a video of myself looking at my hands for the hundredth time.
The eye contact rule is not complicated. Talk to people, not things. Look at the humans who have given you their attention, not at the objects in your hands. Direct your energy toward the faces in the room, not toward the mechanics of the effect.
It is the simplest piece of performing advice I have ever received. And it is the one I have to keep re-learning, show after show, because the pull of the props is strong and the habit of looking down is deeply ingrained from all those hours of solitary practice in hotel rooms where there was no one to look at.
But every time I get it right, every time I lift my eyes from my hands and find a face in the audience and speak directly to that person, I am reminded of why this rule exists. The magic does not happen in my hands. It happens in the space between my eyes and theirs.