I watched a performer at a magic convention in Vienna do something I still think about. He walked on stage, said nothing for about four seconds, smiled, and the room was already his.
He had not performed a single effect. He had not said anything clever or surprising. He had not done a flashy opener or played dramatic music. He walked out, stood there, and something happened in the room. The energy shifted. People leaned forward. Conversations at the back tables stopped. And he had not yet done anything.
After his set — which was excellent, by the way, but that is not the point of this story — I sat at the bar with another performer and tried to articulate what I had just seen. He shrugged and said the thing people always say about moments like that.
“He has it. The It Factor. You either have it or you don’t.”
I nodded, because at the time I did not have a better explanation. But something about that answer bothered me, and it has been bothering me ever since.
The Myth of the Born Performer
Here is what I have come to believe after several years of studying performance — both my own and the performers I admire most: the “It Factor” is real, but the explanation that it is innate and unteachable is wrong. Or at least incomplete in a way that matters enormously.
The idea that some people are simply born with magnetic presence is seductive for two reasons. First, it flatters the people who seem to have it, because it makes their quality feel like a gift rather than a skill. Second, it protects the people who do not have it, because it provides an excuse to stop trying. “I wasn’t born with that thing,” we tell ourselves, and we redirect our energy toward what we can control — technique, method, props.
Both reactions are understandable. Both are wrong.
When I first started performing, I had zero presence. Less than zero, if that is possible. I was a strategy consultant who had spent his career in boardrooms and hotel conference suites, and I carried myself the way consultants do — competent, analytical, slightly guarded. I could hold a meeting. I could run a workshop. I could stand in front of a room of executives and deliver a presentation. But “hold” and “own” are different verbs, and the difference between them is the distance between professional adequacy and magnetic performance.
My first performances were technically clean and personally forgettable. People watched the cards. They did not watch me. The magic happened in my hands but not in the space between me and the audience. I was a delivery system for effects, not a performer.
What I Found When I Started Looking
The shift began when I started reading about performance craft rather than magic technique. Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment was the first book that made me confront what I was missing, and it did so with the characteristic bluntness that I have come to appreciate about Weber’s writing.
Weber argues that the performer’s personality is the product. Not the tricks. Not the methods. Not the props. The person. He uses examples — Kreskin making simple techniques into miracles, David Blaine turning basic card effects into cultural moments, Lance Burton closing a television special not with a giant illusion but with a torn-and-restored newspaper performed on a stool — to show that the common thread among the most successful performers is not technical superiority. It is personal magnetism. The ability to make an audience care about you before they care about what you are doing.
When I first read that, I thought: well, that is great for people who have magnetism. What about the rest of us?
Then I read Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, and something clicked. Fitzkee, writing in the 1940s, makes an argument that I think is one of the most important claims in all of performance literature. He says personality is the most valuable single product of the entertainment industry. And then, crucially, he does not treat it as a mysterious gift. He treats it as a construction. A set of choices. A combination of distinguishing marks — mannerisms, dress, conduct, beliefs, attitudes, manner of talking and walking — that, when assembled deliberately and refined over time, create a distinct individual.
The key word in Fitzkee’s framework is “combination.” Not any single quality. The combination. And that combination, by definition, is something that can be designed, adjusted, and improved. It is not magic. It is architecture.
Deconstructing the “It”
Once I started treating presence as a skill rather than a gift, I began to notice patterns in the performers who seemed to have the “It Factor.” The qualities were not identical across performers — a quiet, intense mentalist has a completely different version of “it” than a loud, funny comedy magician — but certain elements kept showing up.
Confidence. Not arrogance, not bravado, but genuine comfort in their own skin. They looked like they belonged on stage. They did not fidget. They did not rush. They did not seem to be waiting for the audience’s permission to be there.
Attention. They were fully present. Not thinking about the next move, not scanning the room for threats, not reciting internal scripts. They were in the room with the audience, aware of what was happening in real time, and the audience could feel it.
Generosity. This one surprised me. The performers with the strongest presence were not performing at the audience. They were performing for the audience. There was an outward direction to their energy that felt like a gift rather than a demand. Weber talks about this when he describes the difference between performers who communicate their humanity and performers who construct a wall of technique between themselves and the room.
Comfort with silence. This was the quality I noticed in the performer in Vienna. He was not afraid of the gap. He could stand in the silence between walking on stage and beginning his first effect, and that silence was not empty — it was full of his presence. Fitzkee writes about pausing deliberately, about the power of a held moment, and I have come to believe that comfort with silence is one of the clearest signals of true stage presence.
Specificity. Performers with the “It Factor” do not make vague gestures or say approximate words. Everything is precise. The eye contact lands on a specific person. The hand moves to a specific position. The word chosen is the exact word, not a near synonym. This specificity communicates intention, and intention communicates authority, and authority is a significant component of presence.
My Own Experiment
I decided to work on these qualities individually, the way I had worked on sleight of hand — isolating each component, practicing it deliberately, and then integrating it into my performance.
I started with confidence, which for me meant dealing with the gap between how I carried myself in business contexts and how I froze up slightly in performance contexts. In boardrooms, I was comfortable. On stage, I was performing comfort rather than feeling it. The breakthrough came when Adam Wilber, my partner at Vulpine Creations, watched a recording of one of my shows and said something deceptively simple: “You look like you’re asking the audience if it’s okay for you to be there.”
He was right. There was an apologetic quality to my stage presence that I had not noticed until someone pointed it out. A slight lean forward, a tendency to rush through transitions as if I did not want to take up too much of the audience’s time, an unconscious habit of smiling too quickly after an effect — seeking reassurance rather than letting the moment land.
I worked on that for months. Not by trying to be confident, but by eliminating the specific behaviors that communicated the opposite. I stood straighter. I slowed down. I let silence exist. I stopped the reassurance-seeking smile and replaced it with a pause — just holding the moment for two or three seconds after an effect landed, letting the audience have their reaction without me trying to manage it.
The change was not immediate, but it was measurable. I started getting different reactions. Not bigger reactions to the same effects — different reactions. People started making eye contact with me between effects. They started leaning forward during the quiet parts. They started telling me afterward not just that the magic was amazing, but that there was something about the way I performed that was compelling. They could not articulate what it was, but they could feel it.
And that, I think, is where the “It Factor” actually lives. Not in some innate quality that you either have or lack. Not in charisma, which is just a fancy word for “I don’t know how they do that.” It lives in the accumulation of small, specific, practicable behaviors that together create the impression of a person who is fully present, fully comfortable, and fully generous with their attention.
The Exercise Metaphor
I have come to think of the “It Factor” the way I think about physical fitness. Some people have a natural advantage. They are built for strength, or speed, or endurance. But nobody — nobody — achieves peak fitness without training. The natural advantage gives you a head start. The training is what produces the result.
Conversely, someone without a natural advantage who trains consistently and intelligently can surpass someone with natural gifts who coasts on them. I have seen this in magic repeatedly. Performers with enormous natural charisma who never develop craft, and performers with modest natural presence who build something remarkable through deliberate practice.
Fitzkee writes that “people are more interested in people than in any other single thing.” If that is true — and I believe it is — then the most valuable skill a performer can develop is not a sleight or a method or a scripting technique. It is the ability to be the kind of person an audience wants to spend time with. And that ability, like any ability, responds to practice.
Can the “It Factor” be taught? I think the honest answer is: not exactly. You cannot hand someone a manual and have them emerge with magnetic presence. But it can be exercised. It can be deconstructed into components. Each component can be identified, practiced, and refined. And the accumulation of those refined components, over time, produces something that looks and feels remarkably like the “It Factor.”
The performer I watched in Vienna had been performing for decades. Whatever natural gifts he brought to the stage had been honed by thousands of hours of real audience experience. The effortless quality of his presence was the product of enormous effort applied over an enormous span of time.
That, paradoxically, is the most hopeful thing about the “It Factor.” It is not about what you were born with. It is about what you are willing to build.