There was a period during my second year of learning magic when I became obsessed with a particular card routine. It was technically demanding — the kind of thing that required months of practice to execute cleanly. It involved multiple phases, each building on the last, each requiring precise handling that had taken me hundreds of hours to develop. When I could finally perform it without a mistake, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. I had earned this routine through sheer dedication and repetition.
Then I performed it for a group at a dinner event in Vienna.
The reaction was polite. Interested. Mild applause at the end. A few people said “nice” and went back to their conversations. Nobody asked me to do it again. Nobody grabbed a friend and said “You have to see this.” The routine I had spent months perfecting landed with a soft thud.
Later that same evening, almost as an afterthought, I did something simple. A straightforward effect with a borrowed object that took maybe forty-five seconds. No complex handling. No multiple phases. Just a clear, visual moment of impossibility.
The reaction was explosive. People gasped. They replayed it out loud to each other. Someone across the table demanded to see it again. The energy in that corner of the room changed completely.
I walked away from that dinner with a knot in my stomach, because the implication was uncomfortable. The thing I had invested months in was less effective than the thing I could have learned in an afternoon. And I had to ask myself: why had I chosen the complex routine over the simple one in the first place?
The Complexity Bias
The answer, I would eventually understand, is a cognitive bias so pervasive among performers that it might as well be written into the job description. I call it the complexity bias: the systematic tendency to choose complicated approaches over simple ones, not because complexity serves the audience better, but because it serves the performer’s ego.
Darwin Ortiz, in his work on creating powerful magic, makes a point that I found almost painful to read the first time I encountered it. He argues that many performers select effects based on the difficulty of the method rather than the impact of the effect. A performer learns something technically challenging, feels proud of having mastered it, and assumes that the audience will share that pride. But the audience has no idea what is technically difficult. They cannot see the method. They only experience the effect. And the effect of a complex method is often identical to the effect of a simple one — except that the complex method introduces more opportunities for things to go wrong.
The audience does not award points for difficulty. They never have. They respond to impossibility, to surprise, to emotional impact. And these qualities are entirely independent of how hard the effect was to execute. A simple effect performed with conviction and showmanship will always outperform a complex effect performed with technical precision but no soul.
I knew this intellectually. I had read it. I understood it. And I still chose the complex routine, because the bias operates below the level of intellectual understanding.
Where the Bias Comes From
The complexity bias in magic has several roots, and understanding them is the first step toward overcoming the pull.
The first root is effort justification. When you invest significant time and effort into learning something, your brain needs to justify that investment. The psychological term is the effort heuristic — the tendency to assign greater value to things that required more effort. If I spent three months learning a technique, my brain insists that the technique must be valuable. Otherwise, those three months were wasted. And the brain does not like to admit waste.
The second root is peer validation. In the magic community, technical skill is the primary currency of status. When you perform for other magicians — at conventions, at club meetings, in online forums — the complex handling gets the nod of appreciation. The simple effect, no matter how powerful for lay audiences, gets dismissed as “easy” or “basic.” The social incentive structure within the community actively rewards complexity and punishes simplicity.
I experienced this firsthand. When I showed fellow magicians the complex card routine, they were impressed. They asked about the handling. They wanted to know how long it took to learn. When I showed them the simple borrowed object effect, they shrugged. They already knew it. It was “just” a basic effect. The social validation went to the complex routine, which reinforced my belief that it was the better piece.
But the audience in Vienna had not read the same script. They did not know or care which effect was harder. They responded to the one that hit them emotionally, and that was the simple one.
The third root is the most insidious: the complexity bias gives the performer something to hide behind. When you perform something technically demanding, there is a built-in excuse if it does not land. “They did not appreciate the difficulty.” “That audience was not sophisticated enough.” “The conditions were not right for that routine.” Complexity provides cover for failure, because you can always blame the audience’s lack of appreciation rather than the effect’s lack of impact.
A simple effect offers no such cover. If it does not get a reaction, the only possible explanation is that the performance was not good enough. There is nowhere to hide. And for many performers, that exposed feeling is exactly what drives them toward complexity — not because it works better, but because it feels safer.
The Consulting Parallel
My strategy consulting background gave me a useful analogy for understanding this bias. In consulting, there is a well-known tendency to overcomplicating solutions. Junior consultants, eager to demonstrate their analytical skills, build elaborate frameworks and hundred-slide presentations when the client’s problem could be solved with a simple insight and a clear recommendation.
The complexity is not for the client. It is for the consultant. It demonstrates effort. It showcases capability. It justifies the fee. But the client — like the magic audience — does not care about the complexity of the process. The client cares about the result. Did the recommendation work? Did it solve the problem? Was it clear enough to implement?
The best consultants I have worked with share a quality that the best magicians also share: they make the complex look simple. They distill enormous analytical work into a clear, elegant recommendation. They do not show the machinery. They show the result.
In magic, the equivalent is the performer who has mastered complex techniques but deploys them in service of a simple, clear, powerful effect. The audience sees an impossible moment. They do not see the technical architecture that made it possible. And the performer does not need them to see it, because the performer’s ego is not tied to the method. It is tied to the reaction.
The Test I Started Using
After the Vienna dinner, I developed a test that I now apply to every piece in my repertoire. I call it the description test, and it goes like this: can a spectator describe the effect to someone who was not there, in one or two sentences, and have the other person understand why it was amazing?
If the answer is yes, the effect is probably strong regardless of its technical complexity. “He borrowed my ring, closed his hand around it, and when he opened his hand, the ring was gone. Then he found it somewhere impossible.” That is a one-sentence description that communicates a clear, powerful impossibility. The listener immediately understands why it was astonishing.
If the answer is no — if the description requires multiple sentences, qualifications, and contextual explanations — the effect is probably too complex for its own good. “He had me pick a card, and then he did some things with the deck, and then there were four cards on the table, and they changed, and then my card appeared, but it had been in a different packet the whole time, and…” By the time the spectator finishes explaining, the listener has tuned out. The impossibility has been buried under procedural complexity.
My three-month card routine failed the description test catastrophically. The spectator could not explain what happened without describing the sequence of five phases, each of which was impressive to a magician but confusing to a civilian. The simple borrowed object effect passed the test effortlessly.
This test is not foolproof. Some genuinely strong effects are complex and still land powerfully. But as a heuristic for detecting the complexity bias in my own material selection, it has been invaluable. When I find myself choosing a complicated effect over a simple one, the description test forces me to ask: am I choosing this because it is better for the audience, or because it is better for my ego?
The Difficulty of Choosing Simple
Here is what nobody tells you about the bias toward complexity: overcoming it is not just an intellectual exercise. It requires genuine emotional work.
Choosing the simple effect means accepting that the thing you invested months in learning might not be as valuable as the thing you learned in a day. That is a painful realization. It means the effort heuristic is wrong. It means the peer validation you received was misleading. It means the safety net of complexity — the ability to blame the audience for not appreciating your skill — is gone.
Choosing simple means standing naked in front of the audience with nothing between you and the reaction except the effect itself and your performance of it. If it does not work, you cannot blame the method. You can only look at yourself.
This is terrifying for a performer. And it is exactly why so many performers retreat into complexity. Complexity is armor. Simplicity is exposure.
But exposure is where the strongest reactions live. The audience does not want to be impressed by your skill. They want to experience something impossible. And the fastest, most direct path to impossibility is almost always the simplest one.
What I Do Now
I still learn complex techniques. I still practice challenging material. The technical skill is not wasted — it gives me options, it builds my capabilities, and it deepens my understanding of the craft. But I no longer confuse technical difficulty with audience impact. They are different things. Sometimes they overlap. Often they do not.
When I build a set for a keynote or a corporate event, I start with the question “What will create the strongest reaction?” not “What will showcase the most skill?” These questions often lead to different answers. And when they do, I force myself to go with the first question, even when the second question is louder.
The complexity bias is a quiet voice that says: the hard thing must be the good thing. It sounds like wisdom. It feels like dedication. It looks like craft. But it is, at its core, the performer’s ego dressed up as artistic judgment. And recognizing it for what it is — not wisdom but bias — is one of the most liberating realizations I have had on this journey.
Simple is not easy. Simple is exposed. And exposed is where the magic lives.