I want to tell you about two versions of the same show.
The first version happened about two and a half years ago. I was booked for a corporate event in Vienna, a banking group’s annual awards dinner, maybe a hundred and fifty people. It was a bigger audience than I was used to, a more prestigious venue, and the client had high expectations. I prepared the way I thought was adequate: I ran through my show a few times the week before, reviewed my scripts, made sure my props were in order.
Walking out on stage that night, I felt nervous. Not the productive kind of nervous — the shaky kind. The kind where your mouth is dry and your hands are slightly unsteady and the first words out of your mouth sound thin even to you. The show was fine. The effects worked. The audience reacted. But there was a tension in my performance that the audience could sense, a carefulness that drained the energy from moments that should have been effortless.
The second version happened a year later. Same client, same format, roughly the same audience size. But this time, I prepared differently. I rehearsed my show in full, start to finish, every day for two weeks. I rehearsed in different rooms. I rehearsed in the clothes I would wear. I rehearsed with distractions — music playing, the television on — to simulate an imperfect environment. I scripted my transitions down to the word. I practiced my recovery lines for every scenario I could imagine going wrong. I had a friend sit through two full run-throughs and critique every moment.
Walking out on stage that second night, I felt calm. Not numb, not bored, not overconfident. Calm. My voice was steady. My hands were steady. My first line landed exactly the way I wanted it to. And for the rest of the show, I was not thinking about what comes next or whether the technique would hold up. I was thinking about the audience. I was watching their faces, adjusting my timing to their reactions, enjoying the experience of performing rather than enduring it.
The difference between those two shows was not talent. It was not a change in my personality. It was not some breakthrough in self-help psychology or positive affirmation. The difference was homework.
The Eighty-to-Ninety Percent Rule
Weber states a principle in Maximum Entertainment that I have come to consider one of the most important truths in performing: eighty to ninety percent of the problems performers experience on stage trace back to a lack of preparation. Not a lack of talent. Not a lack of material. A lack of preparation.
When I first encountered this claim, I thought it was exaggerated. Eighty to ninety percent? Surely there are problems that arise from audience dynamics, venue issues, technical failures, the unpredictable chaos of live performance. And there are. But even those problems become manageable when your preparation is thorough, because thorough preparation frees up the mental bandwidth to deal with the unexpected. When you are not spending cognitive energy remembering your next line or worrying about whether the technique will work, you have abundant cognitive energy to read the room, adapt to surprises, and handle disruptions with grace.
Under-preparation, by contrast, consumes your bandwidth entirely. You are running your script in the background while trying to engage with the audience in the foreground, and neither gets your full attention. The result is a performer who seems distracted, tense, and slightly mechanical — which is exactly how I seemed at that first Vienna show.
The Homework-Confidence Connection
Here is the mechanism, as I understand it from both personal experience and studying other performers.
Confidence is not an emotion you generate through willpower. It is not something you can talk yourself into. Affirmations in the mirror — “I am a confident performer, I am a confident performer” — are useless if you have not actually done the work. Confidence is the absence of doubt, and doubt lives in the gap between what you need to do and what you are certain you can do.
When you are thoroughly prepared, that gap shrinks to zero. You have rehearsed every moment. You have anticipated every contingency. You know your material so deeply that it lives in your body, not just your brain. There is nothing left to doubt, and so doubt has nothing to feed on, and so confidence emerges naturally — not as something you are performing but as something you are experiencing.
When you are under-prepared, that gap is a canyon. You know there are lines you might forget, transitions that might stumble, moments where the technique might not hold. Your conscious mind is aware of these vulnerabilities, and it translates that awareness into anxiety. The anxiety manifests as hesitation, tension, and a quality of performance that communicates: “I am not sure this is going to work.”
The audience reads that instantly. They do not know you are under-prepared. They do not know what you forgot to rehearse. But they feel the uncertainty, and it makes them uncertain. Their willingness to suspend disbelief decreases. Their critical faculty sharpens. The entire dynamic shifts from collaborative to evaluative.
What Homework Actually Looks Like
When I say homework, I do not mean practicing your sleight of hand. That is important, but it is only the foundation. The homework that builds confidence is the rehearsal of the complete performance experience — everything the audience sees and hears, from the moment you walk out to the moment you walk off.
This is the practice-versus-rehearsal distinction that Weber draws clearly and that changed my approach entirely. Practice is working on individual skills in isolation. Rehearsal is running the complete show in conditions that simulate a real performance. Practice builds technique. Rehearsal builds confidence.
My rehearsal process now looks like this. Two weeks before a show, I start doing full run-throughs. The first few are rough — I am refamiliarizing myself with the flow, catching places where my transitions have gotten sloppy, identifying lines that no longer feel natural. I do these standing up, in the space I will be performing or in a similarly sized room. I do them out loud, at full volume, with all the pauses and audience interactions simulated.
In the second week, I tighten. I time each routine. I make sure my transitions are scripted and smooth. I practice the specific physical movements — where I put props down, which hand holds what, where I stand during each phase of each effect. I practice in the clothes I will wear, because a different jacket changes how your hands move and a different shoe changes how you stand.
In the last few days, I focus on contingencies. What if someone says something unexpected during the volunteer segment? What if a prop does not cooperate? What if the audience is quiet? What if they are loud? I rehearse responses for each scenario, not because I expect any specific problem but because the act of preparing for problems eliminates the fear of problems.
By the time I walk on stage, there is nothing left to worry about. I have done the homework. The confidence is earned.
The Hotel Room Studio
For me, a huge amount of this homework happens in hotel rooms. It has been that way since I started. Two hundred nights a year on the road for consulting work means that my practice space is wherever I happen to be staying. A Hilton in Salzburg. A boutique hotel in Zurich. An Airbnb in Innsbruck.
The hotel room has become my studio, and there is something appropriate about that. The solitary hours of preparation, the repetition in front of a bathroom mirror, the murmured run-throughs with no audience — this is where confidence is manufactured. Not on stage. Not during the performance. In the quiet, private, unglamorous hours of preparation that nobody sees.
I have done full run-throughs of my show in hotel rooms so small that my gestures nearly hit the walls. I have rehearsed transitions while pacing the length of a room that was barely four meters long. I have whispered my scripts at midnight so as not to disturb the people in the next room. None of this is romantic or exciting. It is work. But it is the work that makes everything else possible.
What the Masters Have in Common
Every performer I have studied at length — through books, through videos, through personal observation — shares this trait. The ones who appear effortlessly confident are the ones who prepare obsessively.
Weber describes Bob Cassidy’s insight that “the hard way is actually the easy way.” The performers who take the hard path — the solitary hours of study and development, the years of practice and rehearsal — are the ones who thrive. They understand that the easy path leads to mediocrity and that mediocrity is visible to audiences in the form of uncertainty, hesitation, and a lack of presence.
The performers who skip the homework and rely on natural charisma, quick thinking, or strong material are the ones who hit a ceiling. They can be good. They can fool audiences and get laughs and receive applause. But they cannot achieve the effortless, magnetic confidence that separates a good show from a great one, because that confidence can only be forged in the furnace of preparation.
Ortiz makes a related point in Strong Magic when he argues that showmanship is a body of technique. The techniques of showmanship — timing, audience management, attention control, the engineering of emotional reactions — can be studied and practiced with the same rigor as manual dexterity. But study and practice require time, effort, and the willingness to do unglamorous work. There is no shortcut. There never is.
The Consulting Connection
The parallel to my consulting work is exact. In consulting, confidence in a client presentation comes from one source: having done the analysis. If you know the data, if you have stress-tested your recommendations, if you have anticipated every question the client might ask, you walk into the room calm. If you have not done the work, no amount of polish in your slide deck will save you. The client will sense the gaps.
Performance is identical. The audience is your client. Your show is your presentation. And just as a client can sense when a consultant is winging it, an audience can sense when a performer has not done the homework. The beautiful thing about this is that it makes confidence democratic. You do not need natural charisma or years of childhood experience on stage. You need to do the work. Do it thoroughly enough, and confidence is yours.
The Specific Things Homework Gives You
Beyond the general sense of calm, thorough preparation gives you specific capabilities that are impossible without it.
It gives you spontaneity. The most spontaneous-seeming performers are the most prepared. When your material is fully memorized and your technique is fully automatic, your conscious mind is free to engage with the moment — to notice a funny detail, to respond to a volunteer’s comment, to adjust your delivery based on the audience’s energy. Without that foundation, you are too busy managing the basics to notice the opportunities.
It gives you recovery. When something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong — a well-prepared performer has resources to draw on. Recovery lines. Alternative paths. The ability to vamp while solving a problem. None of these resources exist if you have not prepared them, and in the moment of crisis, you will not invent them.
It gives you presence. The quality of being fully in the room, fully engaged with the audience, fully alive in the moment — this is a direct consequence of not having to think about what comes next. A performer whose preparation has made the script automatic is free to be there, completely, in every moment.
It gives you generosity. When you are confident that the show will work, you can afford to give the audience more. More time with their reactions. More space for their laughter. The under-prepared performer rushes through because they are afraid that any delay will cause the house of cards to collapse. The well-prepared performer takes their time because they know the structure is sound.
Confidence, in the end, is not a quality. It is an account. You make deposits through preparation, rehearsal, and honest self-evaluation. You make withdrawals through performance. As long as the deposits exceed the withdrawals, the account grows. And an account that has been growing for years produces a confidence that is visible from the back row.
Do your homework. Every minute of it counts. The audience may never see your preparation, but they will see — and feel — everything that grows from it.