For the better part of a year, my favorite piece to perform was a card routine I had built from the ground up. I had crafted the patter over dozens of hotel room sessions. I had refined the sequence through countless repetitions. I knew every beat, every pause, every moment where I would make eye contact, every line that was supposed to get a laugh. It was the routine I felt most comfortable with, the one I reached for first when someone asked me to show them something.
And it was, by a considerable margin, the weakest piece in my working repertoire.
I did not know this. I could not have known this. The very thing that made it my favorite — my deep familiarity with it, my comfort performing it, the ease with which it flowed — was the same thing that prevented me from seeing its problems. Familiarity had become a blindfold.
How Familiarity Deceives
The psychological mechanism at work here is called the mere exposure effect, first documented by psychologist Robert Zajonc in the 1960s. The core finding is simple and powerful: the more familiar something becomes, the more positively we evaluate it. We like songs better after we have heard them a few times. We rate faces as more attractive after repeated exposure. We judge ideas as more credible when we have encountered them before.
This effect operates automatically, below conscious awareness. You do not decide to like familiar things more. Your brain simply assigns a positive valence to recognition, and that positive feeling colors every subsequent judgment.
For a performer, this creates a dangerous feedback loop. You create a routine. You practice it hundreds of times. Each repetition increases your familiarity. Each increase in familiarity increases your positive evaluation of it. After a year of practice and performance, the routine feels like your best work — not because it is, but because your brain has marinated in it for so long that it has acquired an emotional warmth that has nothing to do with its actual quality.
The warmth is real. The quality assessment based on that warmth is unreliable.
The Moment I Found Out
The revelation came not from a video review or a self-assessment exercise, but from a conversation after a performance at a corporate event in Linz.
I had performed a short set — four pieces, about twenty minutes total. Afterward, one of the event organizers, a woman whose professional life involved evaluating speakers and entertainers, asked me over coffee which piece I thought was strongest. I answered immediately: the card routine. My favorite. The one I had been performing the longest.
She paused in a way that told me her answer was different.
“Can I be honest?” she asked.
I said yes, expecting a minor quibble. Maybe she preferred a different piece by a small margin.
“The card routine was the only one where I felt like you were going through the motions,” she said. “The other pieces, you seemed present. Engaged. Like you were experiencing them with us. The card routine, you seemed like you were somewhere else. Like you had done it so many times that you were performing it on autopilot.”
The word “autopilot” hit me physically. Because she was right, and I knew she was right, and the only reason I had not seen it myself was that my familiarity with the routine had made my own autopilot invisible to me.
The Autopilot Problem
When you perform something hundreds of times, a predictable cognitive shift occurs. The performance moves from conscious processing to automatic processing. In practice methodology, this is sometimes called the autonomous stage — the point at which a skill becomes so well-learned that it no longer requires conscious attention.
In many domains, automaticity is a good thing. You want your driving skills to be automatic so you can focus on navigation. You want basic motor skills to be automatic so you can focus on higher-order creative decisions. Automaticity frees up cognitive resources.
But in performance, automaticity is a trap. Because performance is not just about executing a skill. It is about being present in the execution. It is about inhabiting each moment as if it is happening for the first time. It is about communicating to the audience that what is occurring right now matters — that it is surprising, engaging, alive.
An automated performance looks and feels mechanical to the audience, even when the performer does not notice it from the inside. The audience can tell. They may not be able to articulate what is wrong, but they feel it. The energy drops. The engagement fades. The connection between performer and audience thins to the point where the performance becomes a demonstration rather than an experience.
My card routine had crossed that line without my noticing. I was executing it flawlessly — the technique was perfect, the timing was precise, the patter was word-for-word. But the life had drained out of it. I was not performing it. I was reciting it. And the audience felt the difference even though I did not.
Why We Cannot See Our Own Staleness
The cruelty of the familiarity trap is that the performer is the last person to notice it. There are several reasons for this.
First, the mere exposure effect keeps generating positive feelings about the routine. Every time you run through it, a small burst of recognition-based pleasure occurs. “This feels good. This feels right. This is my strongest piece.” The positive feeling is genuine. But it is generated by familiarity, not by quality.
Second, the technical fluency of the routine feels like evidence of its strength. Because you can perform it without mistakes, without hesitation, without any sense of struggle, it feels polished. And polished feels professional. But there is a vast difference between polished and alive. A polished performance executed on autopilot can be technically flawless and emotionally dead. The performer feels the polish. The audience feels the deadness.
Third, memory consolidation works against you. When you recall performing the routine, your memory supplies not the actual audience reaction but a composite of all the reactions you have ever received. That composite is biased toward the positive, because positive memories are encoded more strongly than neutral ones. So when you think about how the routine “usually goes,” you remember the best reactions, not the average ones. Your memory gives you a highlight reel when what you need is a representative sample.
All three mechanisms work together to create a picture of the routine that is consistently more positive than reality. The familiarity feels good. The fluency feels professional. The memory feels positive. Every internal signal tells you this is your best work. And every one of those signals is contaminated by bias.
The Consulting Parallel
In strategy consulting, I have seen the identical dynamic play out in organizations. A company develops a product that was once innovative and successful. Over time, they refine it, optimize it, streamline it. The product becomes polished and efficient. But the market has moved on. Customer needs have evolved. Competitors have introduced new approaches. The product that was once the company’s greatest strength has become its greatest liability — not because it got worse, but because the company’s familiarity with it prevented them from seeing that it was no longer meeting the market where the market was.
This is the incumbent’s blind spot. The thing you know best is the thing you evaluate least critically. And the thing you evaluate least critically is the thing most likely to be undermining your position without your knowledge.
In my card routine, I was the incumbent. I had optimized the product to technical perfection. But the market — my audience — was not buying what I was selling. They wanted presence, engagement, the feeling that something extraordinary was happening in real time. And I was offering them a perfectly executed memory of something that used to be extraordinary.
How I Broke the Trap
Breaking the familiarity trap required me to do something deeply uncomfortable: I had to evaluate my favorite routine as if I had never seen it before.
The first step was external feedback. Not the polite feedback you get from friends and family, but the specific, honest feedback of someone who watches performances professionally. The event organizer in Linz gave me that feedback without my even asking for it. But I realized I needed to seek it out systematically rather than waiting for it to arrive by accident.
I started asking specific questions after performances. Not “How did you like it?” — that question invites only positive responses. Instead, I asked things like “Which piece felt the most alive to you?” and “Was there a moment where your attention drifted?” These questions give people permission to identify problems without having to say something is bad. They point toward the weak spots through comparison rather than criticism.
The second step was video comparison. I pulled up recordings of myself performing the card routine from different points in its life. An early recording, when the routine was still new to me and the technique was rougher. A middle recording, from when I was gaining confidence with it. And a recent recording, from the fully polished, fully automated version.
The comparison was startling. The early recording, despite its technical imperfections, had something the recent one did not: life. I was present in the early version. My eyes were alive. My reactions to the audience were genuine. There was a quality of discovery in the performance, as if I was experiencing the magic alongside the audience. The technique was worse, but the performance was better.
The recent recording was technically superior in every measurable way. Smoother handling. Better timing. Cleaner patter. But the person performing it was absent. The body was there. The words were there. The movements were there. The human being was somewhere else.
The Ongoing Discipline
I did not retire that card routine. Instead, I rebuilt it. I rewrote the patter. I changed the structure. I introduced new elements that forced me to stay present — moments of genuine improvisation, audience interactions that could not be scripted, variations that required real-time decisions. I made the routine less polished and more alive.
This felt like regression. My consulting brain protested: you are taking something optimized and deliberately degrading it. But the degradation was not in quality. It was in automation. By introducing uncertainty back into the routine, I forced myself out of autopilot and back into presence.
The principle I now apply is this: if a piece feels completely comfortable, it is probably too comfortable. Comfort in performance is the canary in the coal mine of the familiarity trap. When you feel no tension, no alertness, no sense that something could go differently than expected — that is when the audience is most likely to feel that you are going through the motions.
I rotate material now. I revise pieces that have been in my set too long. I periodically record myself performing my “strongest” material and compare it against recordings from when the material was newer. And I actively seek out the kind of honest feedback that the event organizer in Linz gave me, because my own assessment of my favorite pieces is, by definition, the assessment I can trust the least.
The familiarity trap does not announce itself. It does not feel like a problem. It feels like mastery. It feels like polish. It feels like your best work. And that is exactly why it is so dangerous. The things you love the most in your repertoire are the things you need to examine the most critically. Because the warmth you feel toward them is not evidence of their quality. It is evidence of your exposure. And exposure, left unchecked, turns the living magic of a performance into a well-rehearsed memory of something that used to be alive.